Author: BitMEX Research, the analysis arm of the popular Bitcoin margin trading exchange, recently published a report on the Lightning Network (LN). The scaling solution for the world’s largest cryptocurrency demonstrates considerable growth across several aspects.
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Grows
The Lightning Network, which is Bitcoin’s off-chain scaling solution, continues to grow. According to a recent report by BitMEX Research, the number of non-cooperative channel closures has surged past 60,000. Over 1,000 BTC has been spent in transactions of the kind.
For a transaction to be characterized as a non-cooperative closure, its output has to be redeemed during the sweeping of the funds, following the closure of the channel.
Using different research methodologies, BitMEX Research concluded that there have been over 60,000 channel closures of the kind. They saw transactions spending upwards of 1,000 BTC.
The report also outlines another exciting thing: that this may be a sign of intense experimentation.
“The volume of transactions here is quite large and may indicate more experimentation with lightning than many expected. The data also indicates non-cooperative closures are more of a common closure type than people think.” – Reads the report.
Growth Across The Board
A closer look into the network’s capabilities, however, reveals that it’s growing even further.
As can be seen in the image above, the number of nodes on the LN has increased by 2.5% over the past 30 days, surpassing 11,000 nodes. The number of channels is also up 1.9% over the same period, according to the popular LN monitoring resource 1ML.
The Lightning Network currently boasts a capacity of around 865 BTC. This is 1% more than what it could handle before the past thirty days.
In any case, the developments in the field of the LN are particularly important. Not only are they intended to help Bitcoin get to the masses. Handling microtransactions quicker and at scale is something that’s needed for day-to-day applications, and so far, the Lightning Network seems to be in the right direction.
