Will Blockstream’s Watchtowers Help Keep The Lightning Network Safe From Attacks?

The Lightning Network (LN) may be controlled and ordered by Watchtowers in the future. Watchtowers are guided by Blockstream’s c-Lightning team and would be a very important improvement on the Lightning Network, the second-layer scaling solution proposed to solve Bitcoin’s scalability issues.

Lightning Network Controlled By Watchtowers

At the moment, the Lightning network works with fraud proofs in order to avoid channels that steal funds. Watchtowers will solve this issue in a new enforcement proposal for the LN called Eltoo. Offline users can protect their funds by deferring to Watchtowers.

This is not the first time that this solution is proposed or tested. Indeed, Lightning Labs and other developers have been working with it. However, this is the first time that such a solution would be implemented on c-Lightning.

In order to protect users, Watchtowers register information from users and store it locally. At the same time, they would be very useful for those nodes that go frequently offline. Nodes that are run by cellphones and similar devices are generally less stable than others.

The c-Lightning developer Christian Decker explained that these Watchtowers are going to play a very important role when users run an unreliable network.

During the last years, the Lightning Network has been growing as a solution for the scalability issues that are affecting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. However, it still needs some time to be developed and tested before it is able to reach the market.

In order for the new Watchtower solution to be approved, it is necessary for the Taproot Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) to be accepted by the whole Bitcoin community. It is worth pointing out that some months can pass before the market sees this implementation on the Lightning Network.