CanonLightning
Lightning: paper, then practice.
Lightning is a payment channel. The base chain is the court when a party cheats or leaves, not the till for every payment.
Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja. 2016. Status: Design paper. Last reviewed: 1 October 2026.
- The paper. Poon and Dryja's 2016 design for Bitcoin payments that stay off the main chain inside penalty-backed channels, and that route across a network of those channels using hashed timelock contracts.
- Settlement.
- Lightning profile.
- Channel and chain.
- Settlement checklist.
What this chain does not claim
It does not rank a network, quote a yield, or say the live client still matches the paper. The full study keeps the limits. Primary source: lightning.network paper.