By moving payments off-chain, the cost of opening and closing channels (in the form of on-chain transaction fees) is amortized over the volume of payments in that channel, enabling micropayments and small-value transactions for which the on-chain transaction fees would otherwise be too expensive to justify. Furthermore, the Lightning Network scales not with the transaction throughput of the underlying blockchain, but with modern data processing and latency limits - payments can be made nearly as quickly as packets can be sent.