Cardano Lightning

Permissionless, near instant, highly scalable

Problem

Payments

  • A fundamental part of all commerce: payment.

Who?

There are three parties involved in a payment

  • Consumer (ie payer)
  • Provider (ie payee)
  • Facilitator

All of us are consumers, some are providers, a few are facilitators.

What users want

Users want secure, fast, low cost transactions

However participants have different priorities, eg

  • Consumers want ease-of-use
  • Providers want fast confirmation
  • Facilitators need to handle at scale

Existing systems (1/2)

  • Cash: Permissionless, instant, scalable-ish (lots of people can use it at the same time, but only to pay people near them), questionable security (fraud happens).
  • Bank transfer: Permissioned, some instant others very slow, scalable.
  • Contactless/ Card: Permissioned, near instant, scalable

… (2/2)

  • Decentralised Ledger *: permissionless, maybe fast or scalable but generally not both.

* There are many different designs of decentralised ledger, each with different choices and trade-offs. Some permissioned, some more decentralised than others, some faster, etc.

Market size

  • Contactless transactions will reach $11 trillion by 2027 source : Juniper Research

  • Market Cap for crypto : > $3 trillion source : coinmarketcap.com (Dec 2024)

Intersection

Can we have contactless like experience but permissionless.

Problem statement

We want a payment system that is:

  1. Permissionless and secure
  2. Near instant
  3. Highly scalable

Bitcoin Lightning Network?

In a lightning network:

  • The network is fundamentally a set of channels, not a shared ledger.
  • There is no need to reach consensus, or globally broadcasting state.
  • Payments are routed across channels by participants.
  • Speed of payment isn’t a global property, but a more local one.

BLN does this and is the closest to meeting our aims.

Problems with BLN

However it has some issues:

  • Large technical and resource overhead to use. Every user must run a node.
  • Difficult to efficiently manage capital. Liquidity is required to enable payments to be routed across a network. Moving capital between channels requires multiple transactions.

Solution

Cardano Lightning

Design

  • A perturbation on BLN: its a Lightning Network
  • Focused on addressing the key technical blockers to it being used as a day-to-day payment system.

Tailored Nodes

CL recognises a diversity users have a diversity of needs.

  • For consumers we have a lightweight node, minimal resources, and runs on their phone.
  • Some providers might be happy running their own servers, others wont. There’s a flexible CL node + SDK to suit a full spectrum of usecases.

Leveraging Cardano

  • Cardano’s more powerful scripting language allows us to achieve more with less.

  • In particular we can optimize capital allocation for nodes.

  • For the facilitators, we have a node for efficient handling of many channels concurrently. Those with capital and wanting to put it to use become the facilitators. They receive income on the service they provide, each payment they facilitate in routing.

Team

  • @waalge
  • @paluh
  • @nhenin