By
Godfrey Benjamin
May 10th, 2024
At the new capacity, Lightning Network can handle nearly $2 million worth of BTC in payment channels.
Despite the latest price drop, Bitcoin’s second-layer scalability solution – Lightning Network – continue to make substantial progress. Last week itself, CoinSpeaker reported that Lightning Network Capacity making a new all-time high at 123 BTC. Well, since then, the network has exploded by nearly 300% and has crossed over 400 BTC in just ten days.
According to the data resource website 1ML, the Bitcoin Lightning Network capacity is 442 BTC, at the press time. It means that it can hold nearly $2 million worth of BTC in payment channels. At the same time, the number of channels has shot up at 12,330 during the press time. On the contrary, the node count is up by 8% in the last ten days.
Lightning Network – A Game Changer for Bitcoin Scalability
Ever since the launch on Bitcoin blockchain this March 2018, the Lightning Network journey has remained phenomenal and pathbreaking. Lightning Network is a second-layer blockchain network, deployed on the Bitcoin mainnet. This scalability solution aims to ease off the pressure from the Bitcoin blockchain. With Lightning Network, transactions happen off-chain and added to the Bitcoin network later.
The Lightning Network basically performs all the micropayments while helping to keep the transaction fee lower. Lightning is often touted as a method to bring Bitcoin usage to everyday transactions. There have been several small-scale experiments with the use of Lightning Network. Like for e.g. programmer Laszlo Hanyecz purchased his pizza while paying in BTC using the Lightning network. Also, there was an experiment with mocked-up coke vending machine which saw the BTC payment through Lightning Network.
Lightning Network-Powered Yalls Blog
Talking to CoinDesk, Lightning Labs developer Alex Bosworth shares some interesting insights about the Lightning-powered Yalls blog developed by him. Over the last seven months, Bosworth notes that blog participants have processed nearly 20,000 invoices with the Lightning Network. Reading a Yalls blog costs one cent while leaving a comment costs 0.5 cents. On the other hand, reacting to a post with emoji costs 10 cents while publishing a new article is absolutely free.
“One nice thing about micropayments is that it brings back anonymity to the web,” says Bosworth. “I’m really a fan of the idea that your identity doesn’t have to be tied to a username and password.”
Bosworth also notes that Yall’s Lightning node-and-channels system helps readers to tap into its blog without the need of a traditional subscription. While that several online platforms are finding it difficult these days to deal with fake presence, the payment linked reading & commenting on Yalls blog helps to counter it to some extent. Bosworth says that “The micropayments help there, because then you don’t have robots or spam.”
Even though with this model, Yalls blog has registered an increased activity. “In the beginning of the site there were problems keeping the node online. If the node died, you couldn’t read any articles or do anything on the site. I had to really babysit the node,” Bosworth said. “Over time, that feedback made its way back to LND [Lightning Network Daemon] and now the node is pretty stable.”