Multi-Path Payment (MPP)

Multi-path payment, or MPP, is a Lightning Network technique that splits a single payment into several parts that travel different routes and settle atomically, so the receiver either collects the whole amount or nothing. It removes the requirement that one channel path carry the full payment value, which had made larger Lightning payments unreliable.

Why it matters

Lightning liquidity is fragmented across tens of thousands of channels, few of which can individually carry a large payment. Splitting turns that fragmented liquidity into usable capacity, raising payment success rates substantially, and it improves privacy modestly, since no single routing node sees the full amount. MPP is part of bitcoin's answer to the scaling question: whether an asset with a constrained base layer can still function for payments. Gold faced the same problem physically and resolved it with paper claims that required trusting issuers, while Lightning attempts the same convenience with settlement that remains trust-minimized.

How it works

The sender divides the amount into shards and routes each through channels with sufficient capacity. The receiver waits until all shards arrive before releasing the payment secret, so no partial amount can be claimed. If any shard fails to find a route, the others are cancelled and the sender retries with a different split.