Penalty Transaction

A penalty transaction allows an one party to a Lightning channel to reclaim funds that were stolen during the dishonest close of a Lightning channel. To send a Lightning channel payment, the sender signs a Bitcoin transaction called a commitment transaction which rebalances the channel. This new transaction is sent to the receiver, but is not broadcast to the Bitcoin blockchain. Future Lightning payments will create additional commitment transactions and render this transaction out of date. However, the original transaction is still a valid Bitcoin transaction, and can thus be broadcast to the blockchain. This would close the Lightning channel and undo all Lightning transactions which occurred after the original. This allows parties to steal or double spend on the Lightning Network.

In order to fix this problem, commitment transactions are set up such that even after an old commitment transaction has been confirmed on the blockchain, if someone can produce a newer, valid commitment transaction from the same channel, this transaction can reclaim the stolen funds and additionally claim all of the funds from the thief’s side of the channel.