Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Is Growing ‘Increasingly Centralized,’ Researchers Find

Bitcoin’s lightning network is growing “increasingly centralized,” making it more susceptible to attacks, asserts a new paper by security researchers.

Seen as a potential solution to bitcoin’s scaling headaches, lightning is a payment network allowing for speedier and cheaper transactions. Partly to make lightning more robust, developers and researchers have been trying to spot holes in the network.

Released earlier this month, the paper “Lightning Network: a second path towards centralisation of the Bitcoin economy” (by researchers Jian-Hong Lin, Kevin Primicerio, Tiziano Squartini, Christian Decker and Claudio J. Tessone) concludes that lightning has an “unequal wealth distribution” with a smaller percentage of nodes on the network gradually accumulating a larger proportion of bitcoin (BTC).

Specifically, the researchers found that 10 percent of the nodes control 80 percent of funds on the network. The situation, they caution, creates room for disruption. If most of the bitcoin is…