Blockstream recently revealed its plans to make multi-part payments interoperable on the Lightning Network, a development which essentially means that sending large Bitcoin transactions on top of the layer 2 network would be possible in the future. This development is instrumental in terms of the Bitcoin network which has been plagued with scalability woes for a long time now.
According to the latest report, multi-part payments support will be included in the new c-lightning 0.8.0 release, which is a Blockstream-native open implementation of the Lightning Network protocol. Revealed by Blockstream Core Tech Engineer Rusty Russel on the latest edition of the Stephen Livera Podcast, he said,
“So the next c-lightning release, which will be kind of out this week we’ll actually have multi-part payments support.”
Samson Mow, CSO of Blockstream, had previously stated that Multi-part payments had passed interoperation tests and hinted that it will be made available for use soon. Explaining the way the Lightning Network functions at the moment, he stated,
“If I send you an invoice and I want you to pay me some money, you have to basically pay it in one big chunk, right? So you have to find, you know, you’re trying to pay me like, you know 10,000 satoshis you have to find a path that will allow you to pay 10,000 satoshi through every hop to get to me, right? And if you can’t do that, you can’t pay me.”
While this works for small payments, the same cannot be said for bigger amounts. But, when “multi-part payments” come into the picture, it enables users to split large payments into smaller ones to route successfully.
Russel admitted that there’s enough to test, but the normal pay command still doesn’t understand multi-part payments. Hence, getting the infrastructure out there is a priority. In the subsequent releases of the c-lighting versions, users will see enhanced heuristics on which the multi-part payments will be used. In terms of the success of payments and users running their own node, the engineer believes that the Lightning Network is more stable than it was a year ago.
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