Opinion: The Lightning Network will make Bitcoin a global medium of exchange

The Lightning Network’s theoretical throughput for micro-payments is 40 million TPS. That equates to blocks of 14.4 TB every ten minutes, said Samson Mow, Blockstream’s chief strategy officer.

“LN enables Bitcoin to be a decentralized medium of exchange on a planetary scale,” he said.

In September, Glassnode analysts drew attention to unprecedented dynamics in protocol metrics. In their view, this was driven by the addition to Twitter of the ability to accept cryptocurrency donations and the legalization of Bitcoin in El Salvador.

Arcane Research analysts predicted that the number of active LN users by 2030 could exceed 700 million.

As of writing, the number of nodes in the network had reached 17,797. Since the start of the year, the metric has risen by 115%. The number of payment channels stands at 75,924, and capacity exceeds 3,152 BTC — about three times higher than at the start of January.

As a reminder, this year support for the protocol was introduced by the Bitcoin exchange OKEx and the P2P trading platform Paxful. The integration of Lightning payments into its electronics-retail network was announced by Mexican billionaire Salinas Pliego.