Lightning Network’s Throughput Reaches Over 5,000 BTC

The past couple of months has put immense stress on the crypto sector. Nevertheless, some networks are increasing their popularity, as well as their technical specifications.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network, for example, increased its total capacity in public channels to over 5,000 BTC for the first time. Bitcoin’s main scaling solution managed to push out some positive developments in the past couple of months. The developments came less than four months after the capacity hit 4,000 BTC.

What does the capacity increase mean?

More capacity means more liquidity, faster payment speeds, and ultimately larger transaction volumes. The capacity increase, however, comes after over four years of criticisms, mainly from proponents of other blockchains.

Nevertheless, the Lightning Network solution has continued its uptrend, despite a tough year for the crypto market. The network growth can be contributed to organic utility and the need for such a solution. The Lightning Network can also be used for speculation, trading, leveraging, or any potential pump-and-dump VC-funded incentivization schemes.

“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.” researchers from Messari stated.

Messari added that Lightning channel and node counts have increased 24% and 14% YoY, respectively, which indicates a trajectory towards becoming a mature financial payment network, rather than remaining a “hobbyist network”.

Data from Arcane Research showcased that the final push above 5,000 BTC was largely driven by River Financial and Loop by Lightning Labs expanding their channel capacity.

Where next?

The infrastructure company behind Lightning Network - Lightning Labs, pushed a testnet version of the Taro daemon, which lets Bitcoin developers to send, receive, and create assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.