This comes days after the proponents of the SegWit2x scaling solution announced they wouldn't move forward with a doubling of Bitcoin's block size due to lack of consensus. Since larger blocks are clearly dead in the water, there is only one apparent solution to the scalability problem: lightning network.In addition to all the private payment channels they are a part of, each peer would have one channel open to the Bitcoin Blockchain.

The lightning network is scale-free, low-fee solution that has the potential to solve Bitcoin's scalability problem. As transaction volume on the Bitcoin network increases and the amount of data that can fit in a block remains the same, the Bitcoin economy suffers from a congested network. It is beginning to take longer than usual - up to several hours - for a transaction to be confirmed on the Bitcoin network and high transaction fees plague the network once again.