Teechain is a layer two payment network that offers high performance and strong security for blockchains and cryptocurrencies. In this blogpost we evaluate the performance of Teechain for the Bitcoin network: we look at the maximum throughput of several Teechain payment networks and measure payment latencies. For those who missed our first blogpost where we introduced Teechain and discussed how it works, you can catch up here.

Blockchains in cryptocurrencies allow users to exchange funds securely. However, their performance is limited by their need to achieve consensus for all payments. To overcome this, blockchain payment networks, such as the Lightning Network and Raiden, have proposed forming a second layer on top of the blockchain to allow payments to be executed off-chain, without writing to the blockchain for every transaction, thus enabling much higher transaction throughput with lower latency.