Researchers Conrad Burchert and Roger Wattenhofer and Blockstream engineer Christian Decker are putting new effort into developing Bitcoin's Lightning Network. They have proposed a more scalable version of the payments channel scheme, believed by developers to be the best way to expand Bitcoin in order to accommodate more users. Bitcoin's "layer two", Lightning, hasn't yet been pushed live onto the Bitcoin blockchain, but proponents of the idea see it as a way to boost Bitcoin's transaction capacity without increasing the block size.
