Bitcoin's Lightning Network Growth Accelerates as Its Capacity Surpasses $3 Mill

[Magician]

Bitcoin’s layer-two scaling solution, the Lightning Network (LN) has recently seen its capacity surpass the $3 million mark, as it now has a capacity of 773.7 BTC. The network now has 7,185 nodes, and 34,180 open payment channels.

According to available data, the Lightning Network was launched little over a year ago, and it took months for its capacity to reach $100,000, even though at the time BTC was trading close to its all-time high.

Since then, its growth has been accelerating, according to BitcoinVisuals. In November of last year its capacity surpassed $1 million, and in December it managed to briefly break thoruhg $2 million before falling back down. Since then, it has kept on growing.


Source: Bitcoin Visuals

The average capacity per channel is currently at $92, and currently every node has an average of 18 channels. Average node capacity is at little over $1,500, or 40 million satoshis. While its widely accepted the LN is still in its early days, its explosive growth shows the cryptocurrency community is betting on it.

It has partly kept on growing thanks to the attention it has been receiving. Last month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey backed a LN-based ‘trust game’ that involved users sending each other a ‘torch’ worth a continuously growing amount of satoshis.

Soon after the LN torch reached Fidelity Digital Assets, which then passed it along to HBS Blockchain and Crypto Club, a student club at Harvard Business School. The torch has also passed Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, TRON’s Justin Sun, and others.

Developers building on the network have also contributed to its growth. As CryptoGlobe covered Koala Studio, an online gaming platform, has recently launched a title called Lightning Chess. It’s a chess game that lets users undo moves, extend timers ,and wager bets using the LN.

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