In just two years, Bitcoin’s Layer Two network, known as the “Lightning Network”, witnessed an incredible increase of 1,212 percent. In August 2023, it was recorded an impressive approximately 6.6 million transactions, a significant increase compared to 503,000 transactions from August 2021.
This astonishing growth was highlighted in a report by the company’s research analyst Sam Wouters River, published on October 10 of the same year. Even despite the 44 percent drop in the price of Bitcoin and reduced interest of new investors, there is a visible increase in the volume of diverted transactions. It prompted Wouters to jokingly note on Twitter that the phrase “'No one uses Lightning'” should now be recognized as obsolete.
According to Rivero’s report, in August 2023, Lightning significantly increased volume transactions, processing $78.2 million. This represents a significant jump of 546 percent in compared to $12.1 million in August 2021, when K33 did it. This one emphasis on the growing importance of Lightning as a medium of exchange makes it now responsible for at least 47 percent of all Bitcoin transactions on the main chain.
In August 2023, the average value of Lightning transactions was approx 44,700 satoshis, which is equivalent to 11.84 US dollars. River’s estimate for September suggests there were between 279,000 and 1.1 million active Lightning users at the time. Except of that, about 27 percent of the growth in the volume of transactions is related to activities such as games, giving tipping on social networks and providing streaming services.
In August 2023, River shared that their platform had achieved an outstanding 99.7 percent success rate for Lightning payments, spanning the total 308,000 transactions. The main problem that made these transactions difficult was limited liquidity of payment methods.
In their extensive data set, River tracked 2.5 million transactions, and the nodes that were part of that set, they made up 29 percent of the total capacity of the network and 10 percent of its channels payments.