The Bitcoin ecosystem has been adaptive to various technologies, with many of them intent on solving Bitcoin’s utility; one of them is Lightning Network. Bitcoin’s Lightning Network was introduced as a second layer technology to execute micropayments instantly and at low costs. However, there has been a constant debate about whether or not Lightning has managed to solve these problems.
According to research by TokenInsight, LN recorded healthy growth in terms of network value and number of channels. Even though the amount of BTC locked in LN increased significantly in H1 of 2019, it started to drop in H2 due to the unstable Bitcoin market. The LN capacity on 9 May 2019 was 1,104.676 BTC, which was worth $6,937,081 at that time. Following the same, the network capacity noted a drop and on 10 February 2020, the capacity was noted to be 863.434 BTC. However, due to the sharp rise in BTC’s price, the value had crossed the previous month’s high and was at $8.50 million, according to Bitcoin Visuals.
Source: Bitcoin Visuals
Lightning Network’s channels were also found to be on a rise since 2019. According to TokenInsight, the overall number of channels doubled YoY to nearly 5000 channels. However, the number of channels fell, when compared to 2019. According to data provided by Bitcoin Visuals, the total number of channels on 18 March 2019 was 40,002, while on 10 February 2020, this number was noted to be 32,131 channels.
Source: Bitcoin Visuals
Lightning nodes grew tremendously between January 2019 and February 2020 at a rate of 105%. The nodes with channels on Lightning were 2,493 on 7 January 2019 and as the LN became more popular, the number of nodes rose to 5,112 nodes on 10 February 2020.
Source: Bitcoin Visuals
These nodes are distributed globally, but Europe and North America shared 90%+ of all identifiable network nodes, according to TokenInsight.
