In the next decade, the Bitcoin Lightning network will be
a dominant scaling solution for the Lightning Network that enables nearly-instantaneous and irreversible payments to be sent to anyone, anywhere in the world,” says Bitcoin developer and Blockstream engineer Rusty Russell.
“The current plan is to build the first layers on top of the existing infrastructure (e.g. a Bitcoin blockchain) to allow quick cross-chain payments between chains, and the second layer or layers to allow additional transactions to be conducted.”
As it stands, only SegWit, BOLT12 and Schnorr signatures can be used for off-chain routing while payment signatures are still necessary on-chain.
“With this release, it’s possible for Lightning to off-chain even more of the heavy lifting of doing routing,” Russel writes. “