One of the defining features of the Lightning Network is the ability to route payments between network users without the need to trust one or more intermediaries. In most cases, it should not be necessary for parties to create a direct payment channel in order to complete a payment. Payment routing, or finding a path of payment channels, is therefore an issue of particular importance for the Lightning Network.

Flare - a Bitfury proposal - will allow for huge scalability of the transaction processing power of the Bitcoin Blockchain network, with transactions per second (tps) capacity potentially exceeding that of legacy payment rails (such as Visa or PayPal). After implementation of Flare, they expect to achieve performance of at least 400 tps per single payment channel, and more than 100,000 tps for network overall in our test environment by the end of July.