Lightning Network Capacity Exceeds 4,000 Bitcoin

With over 4000 Bitcoin (worth around $116 million at current rates) locked in channels, the Bitcoin lightning network’s capacity reached a new milestone this week. In the previous several months, user interaction has increased significantly, which has contributed to this newest milestone.

In 2018, the Bitcoin Lightning Network became live. For the sake of speeding up and lowering the cost of transactions, a new protocol has been designed to help the Bitcoin blockchain process a portion of them.

There was doubt about the technology’s ability to scale since it was the first of its type. But the network has grown enormously in the previous four years. Despite this. In 2020, the network broke the 1000 BTC (worth $9.5 million at the time) capacity threshold, with 13,185 nodes and 37,480 active channels engaging the network.

Almost immediately after that, there was a twofold increase in the number of nodes, and that number is expected to rise much more over the next year. As much as 80,000 new channels were added to the protocol in 2021.

About 4000 BTC is now stored in lightning channels, with about 85,396 channels and 17,659 active nodes. The protocol’s worth has doubled since the middle of last year, and the number of channels has increased by 6.25 percent.

A greater number of users have been drawn to the alternative payment method as seen by recent statistics compared to previous ones.

Bitfinex, one of the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges, implemented the Bitcoin Lightning Network on its platform a year after it was launched. More than six million Paxful users now have the ability to send and receive bitcoins via the protocol after the leading peer-to-peer crypto exchange Paxful followed suit in September of this year.

OKCoin, a well-known cryptocurrency exchange, also implemented the Lightning Network last year, only a few months after announcing its ambitions. Significantly, the adoption of the bitcoin lightning network by crypto exchanges has contributed to its expansion.

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