The Lightning Network (LN) is a payment protocol built on the bitcoin blockchain. It is intended to enable fast transactions among participating nodes (independently run members of the network) and has been proposed as a solution to the bitcoin scalability problem. History. Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja published a Lightning Network white paper in February 2015. Lightning Labs launched the Lightning Network in 2018 with the goal of reducing the cost and time required for cryptocurrency transaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network