The Lightning Network Grew by 1212% in 2 Years - River Research
"There are no public metrics on how many people use Lightning, so critics point at metrics such as node count, channels, and capacity, which have plateaued over the past year and thus give a false impression that Lightning's adoption may be stagnating or declining. Our research shows the opposite.."
- "Based on data from the operators of nodes comprising 52% of the public capacity on the Lightning Network, we estimate a lower bound of 6.6 million routed Lightning transactions in August 2023. The upper bound could be a multiple of this number if there was data availability of direct and private transactions between participants."
"This represents a 1,212% increase since the 503k Lightning payments estimate for August 2021 by K33 (formerly Arcane Research). This growth was despite a 44% Bitcoin price drop and a 45% decrease in search interest."
- "It is the equivalent of 2.5 transactions per second, compared to Bitcoin’s on-chain average of 4.4 TPS and K33’s August 2021 benchmark of 0.2 TPS."
- "In August 2023, we estimate that around $78.2 million was publicly routed using 5,000 BTC in capacity."
"The average Lightning transaction size on the public network was around 44.7k satoshis, or $11.84 in August 2023. Size distribution shows that nearly all Lightning payments are unaffordable on the Bitcoin blockchain. Lightning is effectively extending Bitcoin’s utility by enabling low-value payments over the Internet."
- "We estimate that there are between 279k and 1.116 million monthly active Lightning users as of September 2023, with an estimated ratio of 1:8 non-custodial to custodial Lightning users."
- "Between 1.83.7 million Lightning wallets were downloaded to use Lightning, with at least 122 million wallets downloaded that have access to Lightning."
- "We mapped out 173 companies in the Lightning industry across 28 categories and have gathered them in an industry market map on page 20 of this report."
- "$530.93 million was raised by 39 Lightning companies between 2018 and the end of 2022. 19% of all Lightning companies received funding. $428.46 million of this funding was raised in 2022, an outstanding year for Lightning funding relative to global VC funding, which dropped by 34%."
- "River’s Lightning payment success rate was 99.7% in August 2023 across 308k transactions."
- "Important drivers of future Lightning growth are more exchange adoption, select technical upgrades, as well as non-Bitcoin businesses adopting Lightning."
