In a report published on Wednesday, Fidelity Digital Active in collaboration with Lightning Pague Voltage launched report In the state of the light network.
The report details the many ways in which the Lightning Network has grown since its launch in 2018.
It also illustrates how more companies have begun to incorporate lightning in 2024 that in any previous year, which are forming larger channels in the network and that more ray nodes are entering online.
Some key statistics of the piece include the following:
- The total ray capacity called American dollars has increased by 2,767% since 2020
- Its capacity called Bitcoin has grown by 384% in the same period
- Currently, almost all payments on lightning below 1,000,000 processed SATs in less than 1.1 seconds
While these statistics made me optimistic, it was other information in the report that really resonated to me and made me rethink how Bitcoin and Lightning I see.
Below were the three main conclusions of the report:
- Ray payments are earning traction in Our (Bitcoin’s largest circular economy in the world), since Nostr users have sent more than 3.6 million individual zaps in the last six months
- Projects such as Ark, another Bitcoin layer 2 protocol, illustrate that Lightning has use cases beyond the channels of equal to equal (ARK allows users to share virtual utxos (vutxes) with a larger group instead of a base individual) can be built so that many did not initially anticipate
- The “Hodl” mentality is one of the things that still slow down the adoption of lightning; In other words, if Bitcoin enthusiasts do not spend their bitcoin, rays growth can stagnate, which could damage Bitcoin’s value proposal
So, as we are here in early 2025, a year that many think it will be great for rays, I cannot avoid being optimistic to see what type of rays of traction in the next 10 months.
It is time for Bitcoin to be used more as a means of exchange, the way in which Satoshi intended to be.
