Unlike Bitcoin and other altcoins, Stellar aims to become the world’s digital payment rail, by focusing on scaling, instant payments, and extremely low fees. Lightning Network can help to achieve this. However, LN was originally designed for BTC, therefore the Stellar team are now working on developing their own Lightning Network. The solution will come in test in April this year and will be followed by beta implementation of the state channels in August. Thus, if everything goes as planned, Stellar should have Lightning capabilities before the end of 2018.