{"document_id":"BLC-PAPER-0004","slug":"lightning","title":"The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments","authors":"Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja","year":2016,"date_label":"2016 draft. Cite the PDF you opened. Versions of this paper differ.","publisher":"Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Scaling","topics":["Payment channels","Bitcoin"],"source_url":"https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf","source_label":"lightning.network paper","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"PDF linked from lightning.network. Not a specification of today's channel implementations.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. Read the PDF at the publisher.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"Lightning is a payment channel on Bitcoin. The base chain is the court when a party cheats or leaves, not the till for every payment.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/lightning","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/lightning","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/lightning","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"Lightning study","href":"/whitepaper/lightning"},{"rel":"Sits on","label":"Bitcoin","href":"/research/corpus/papers/bitcoin"},{"rel":"Proposes","label":"Off-chain updates, on-chain dispute","href":"/learn/concepts/settlement"},{"rel":"Protocol profile","label":"Lightning profile","href":"/learn/protocols/lightning"},{"rel":"Compare","label":"Channel and chain","href":"/learn/compare/lightning-vs-on-chain"}]}