The Lightning Network (LN), Bitcoin’s ultimate scaling solution, has reached a new record. After a year since it was released to the market, it has reached a network capacity of 1,000 BTC. This is very important for the LN and the Bitcoin community, that is waiting for a solution to its scaling issues.
Lightning Network Capacity Surpasses 1,000 BTC
Just a year ago, the CEO of Lightning Labs, Elizabeth Stark, announced that they were releasing the first beta of the Lightning Network. The LN has been created in order to help Bitcoin to scale. Back in December 2017, Bitcoin was reaching its all-time high close to $20,000. Due to the large number of transactions that were processed by the network, the fees paid by users were really high and they could take several hours to be finally processed.
With the LN, Bitcoin will be able to scale, process thousands of transactions per second and users would pay very low fees. The proposal has received the support of Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, who supported the Tippin.me application on its platform.
According to the LN monitoring website 1ML, the Lightning Network has a capacity of 1059 BTC. Moreover, it has 7,395 nodes and 39,329 channels. This shows that in just a year, the LN has registered an important growth, which is expected to keep the positive trend throughout 2019.
The Twitter user called hodlonaut has helped the network grow. Indeed, he started on Twitter a campaign called Lightning Torch that aimed at spreading the knowledge about the LN. Users had to pass a LN transaction to others and increasing the funds transacted each time a new user received it.
The Lightning Network is also expected to allow micropayments to be processed using Bitcoin. At the moment, it is not possible to send small payments in BTC. With the LN, users will have the possibility to transact very small sums of money without having to pay for large fees or wait long periods of time for the transaction to be processed.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin has surpassed $4,000. The digital asset has a market capitalization of $71 billion. There are several experts that predict that Bitcoin will keep growing in the near future after a whole year in a bear trend.
