Growth of the Lightning Network

In today’s review, we look at the growth of the Lightning Network.

“Bitcoin by itself cannot scale so that every financial transaction in the world is broadcast to all network nodes and included in the main blockchain. We need a secondary layer of payment systems that is easier and more efficient”, —

Hal Finney .

Lightning Network is a decentralized, scalable second layer solution built on top of the Bitcoin network that allows for cheap payments between counterparties. The Lightning Network can essentially be thought of as a tab bar between counterparties, with the opening and closing of a tab serving as the equivalent of an on-chain BTC transaction. The notorious “tab bar” is built using a 2-of-2 multisig wallet that allows users to control their funds in the event of a hostile counterparty. , you can find more information here.

While the Lighting Network does allow private channels between partners, the total balance locked in these channels is not public, which speaks for itself. Thus, in the current review, we will focus on the bandwidth of public channels, but it is important to remember that this does not include potentially large channels created between private counterparties.

At the time of writing, the current bandwidth The capacity of the public channel is BTC. The panel below shows the growth rate for 03 days, which reflect the steady growth of the Lightning Network over the previous three years.

Over the past two years, the highest growth was in 171054 year, while – daily growth peaked year on year nearly 348% in August last year. Since then, public bandwidth growth has slowed, but is still growing by more than 20% year-on-year, averaging growth over the last days.

When estimating the bandwidth of the public channel in US dollars, the explosive growth of the network becomes even more impressive, because, at the end After all, LN is a protocol for transferring value between peers. Thus, as the bitcoin asset becomes more valuable, the liquidity between users, denominated in BTC, increases. It is also important to note that the graph below is presented on a logarithmic scale.