>>60601454No, the Lightning Network is not more private than Monero. Monero is designed with privacy as a core feature, using techniques like ring signatures, stealth addresses, and RingCT to obscure sender, receiver, and transaction amounts by default. Every transaction on Monero’s blockchain is private, making it nearly impossible to trace without specific view keys.[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero)
The Lightning Network, a layer-2 solution for Bitcoin, improves privacy over Bitcoin’s transparent blockchain by conducting transactions off-chain through payment channels. Only channel opening and closing transactions appear on-chain, and Lightning uses onion routing to obscure payment paths. However, privacy depends on factors like node trustworthiness, as intermediate nodes can potentially log data or correlate transactions. If a node is compromised or run by a malicious entity (e.g., blockchain analysis firms), privacy can be undermined. Additionally, channel closures can leak information via on-chain transactions, and receivers must share invoice details, risking de-anonymization.
Monero’s base layer is inherently private, battle-tested since 2016 on darknet markets with no major vulnerabilities, whereas Lightning’s privacy is optional, complex to maintain, and relies on a transparent base layer, making it less robust. Recent posts on X echo this, emphasizing Monero’s superior privacy due to its default, on-chain anonymity compared to Lightning’s potential for routing leaks and third-party reliance.