'Multi-Part' Payments Could Bring Bigger Bitcoin Sums to Lightning Network

Bitcoin tech startup Blockstream said its c-lightning software team is the first to release a working version of "Multi-part payments."

While the name, c-lightning v0.8.0, is a mouthful, it's a big improvement for the user experience of the lightning network, a new layer that's probably bitcoin's best shot at scaling to support a larger number of payments.

The change updates the plumbing of lightning network payments so users can send larger lightning payments, with a much smaller risk of them failing.

"The user experience of lightning clients is a topic that is brought up often, and we are working actively on improving the status quo, together with the teams working on other lightning implementations. Our goal is to make using lightning as easy as using an on-chain wallet," lightning developer Christian Decker explains in a blog post.

For one thing, there's a chance there won't be enough liquidity in the network to support the transaction, especially for larger payments.

If one of the nodes in the path doesn't have enough bitcoin, the user is out of luck and the payment fails.

Multi-part payments tackle this problem by making it possible to break a payment into smaller pieces that are easier to send across the network, since a user can combine bitcoin from multiple channels they have open to send payments.

"Multi-part payments allow a lightning node to bundle the capacity in all its channels when making a payment, making larger payments than any individual channel on its own would allow," Decker writes.

Decker claims the code change also "Greatly increases" the resiliency of the entire payment network.

Since users sending payments are less likely to have to transact with a large node, that's a "Single point of failure."