Bitcoin Lightning Network growth capacity surges to 3,400 BTC

The capacity of the Bitcoin Lightning Network has short-circuited over the three months to circa 3,400 BTC capacity, after surging throughout 2021.

Bitcoin Lightning Network growth capacity surges to 3,400 BTC

Exponential climb in capacity over 2022, the Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network made a lackluster start to the new year. According to Arcane Research Report, growth in the Lightning Network capacity or the number of BTC locked up in channels, has stuttered. 

The Lightning Network increased from 1,000 to 3,000 BTC in just 8 months in 2021, 3,000 mark in mid-October. 

While the network strike all-time highs, growth grinds down. The total BTC locked in the network is peaking just shy of the 3,500 BTC mark.

The Lightning Network is one answer to the scalability issue that plagued the Bitcoin protocol. Lightning allows instant and super low-cost off-chain transactions, it requires Bitcoin to be locked up in payment channels distributed across lightning nodes. 

in 2021, EL Salvador onboarding a whole country and Twitter integrating Bitcoin Lightning tipping. in an October report, Arcane Research predicted that there would be 700 million Lightning Network users by 2030. 

Bitcoin Lightning Network and Twitter account declared that platforms like Umbret sent initial growth to the moon.

Danny Scott is the CEO and Co-Founder at CoinCorner is the UK's leading lightning exchange. 

“I don't think we're seeing a growth of the Lightning Network plateauing at all. We saw a major growth spike due to last year's news and growth would now appear to be more organic.”

S-curve adoption plateaus to one side, he notes that "December is a holiday period for many around the world and often when the Bitcoin industry slows down."

Rene Pickhardt is the co-author of the “Mastering explained that the slowdown in growth could actually be a good thing for Bitcoin, he tweeted 

“Given the fact that node count can only grow with channels and that the channel growth is limited by storage constraints in Bitcoin, we might only have a very short period of time with exponential growth. After that, we will be at best linear.”

Lightning may strike twice for the second layer Bitcoin solution, A wealth of updates and news may spark further growth. like the American mobile payment service Cash App which rolled out Lightning Network integration to its circa 30 million users. 

Better UX and easy lightning integration for existing apps and exchanges might be the shock that the network needs Danny sheds light on the situation:

“Once we introduced "Lightning Addresses" (eg. [email protected]) to make it easier for our customers to receive Lightning payments we have seen an incredible uptick in usage.”

The Arcane Research paper agrees with CoinCorner that the Lightning Network could be entering a new growth phase; the best could be yet to come. 

Read: Jack Dorsey's Spiral introduces Bitcoin Lightning Development Kit