Lightning Network: A Comparative Review of Transaction Fees and Data Analysis

Blockchain is a revolutionary, immutable database disrupting the finance industry with a potential to provide payments in a secure environment, unhindered by intermediaries. However, scalability and throughput issues plague the technology and prevent it's mass scale adoption. The paper focusses on Lightning Network, the off-chain, scalable and high throughput payment solution from Bitcoin. A comparison is conducted to highlight the fee incurred for payment transactions through Lightning Network, Raiden, Stellar, Bitcoin and conventional payment systems to assess its viability as a blockchain-based payment sys-tem. The paper also provides an analysis of the data of Lightning Network, to give a global overview of its usage and reachability.