Lightning won’t be “the winner” in the sense you are thinking. Lightning scales *payments,* but not UTXO ownership.

We will simply have different protocols for scaling different functions of money. I highly suspect that CTV (or something similar) will be the dominant UTXO ownership scaling primitive, but time will tell there.

I think Lightning has pretty much cemented itself as the major payments scaling and bridging technology, and competing with its liquidity at this point would be difficult without a legitimate 10x disruptor. Which I would be thrilled to see, but find incredibly unlikely in the short term. I suspect the improvements will be incremental, and will actually be updates to Lightning, rather than a replacement.

It’s hard to understate the scaling potential of the *combination* of UTXO scaling AND payments scaling. Imagine if 90% of lightning channels were “virtual,” and never actually had to be confirmed on chain. This is what we could potentially see, and it would be awesome.