The combined capacity in public channels of Bitcoin Lightning Network’s total capacity in public channels has crossed 5000 BTC for the first time.
BTC’s main scaling solution, designed to make transactions cheaper and faster, has made some positive developments in recent times with expansion and development. The new feat comes less than four months after the capacity hit 4,000 BTC.
The Final Push
The more capacity on the LN network means more liquidity is on hand with which users can conduct faster payment speeds and potentially larger transaction volumes. Over the past four years since its inception, the network has faced a number of criticisms, mainly from proponents of other blockchains.
2022 may have been a tough year for the crypto market. But the scaling solution has continued its uptrend, albeit slowly. Its growth, especially through the current bear market, can be attributed to organic utility and the need for it, and now for speculation, trading, leveraging, or any potential pump-and-dump VC-funded incentivization scheme that depends on using retail market players as exit liquidity.
Market intelligence platform, Messari had recently stated,
“The Lightning Network has been in its own siloed bull market over the past year, insulated from the overall market downturn. LN’s key metrics have steadily grown, despite bitcoin’s price dropping 57% over the past year.”
The report suggested that Lightning channel and node counts have increased 24% and 14% YoY, respectively, which is indicative of the fact that the network is moving away from a “hobbyist network” toward being a mature financial payment network.
According to yet another data analytic platform, Arcane Research, the final push above 5,000 BTC, roughly worth $100 million, was largely driven by River Financial and Loop by Lightning Labs expanding their channel capacity.
El Salvador’s move to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender, followed by large companies such as McDonald’s and Starbucks announcing integration to Lightning payments using third-party software, were major milestones for the infrastructure.
Growth Trajectory
Lightning Labs, the infrastructure firm behind Lightning Network, released the tesnet version of the Taro daemon to enable Bitcoin devs to create, send and receive assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. The alpha release was aimed to “Bitcoinize” the dollar.
The company also announced raising $70 million in Series B funding, led by Valor Equity Partners and joined by global asset manager Baillie Gifford earlier this year. The capital infusion was said to help the network capable of transacting trillions of dollars in volume annually, making it a competitor to the likes of Visa.
Technology company MicroStrategy revealed seeking a full-time Lightning Network software engineer, according to a job listing posted last month, to build LN-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Some of the firms that adopted LN in 2022 are Cash App, Kraken, BitPay, and Robinhood.
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