BTC Lightning Network Payments Surge Over 400%: Report

The BTC lightning Network payments surge over 400% with more than 80 million users being estimated to have access to the network compared with 100,000 users last summer according to a report by Arcane Research so let’s read more today in our latest Bitcoin news.

The main driver of growth for the LN this year was Jack Dorsey’s payments app Cash App but also El Salvador’s national Lightning wallet Chivo and the Paxful trading app contributed to the growth in 2021. The authors of the report noted that while LN payments peaked in November since retraced but the picture is quite different if we exclude deposits and withdrawals from the trading services:

“[Then] we see that all other payments actually dipped in November but have since grown to a new high.”

In the meantime, Arcane’s research found that the total payment volume in the first two months of 2022, or half of the value transacted came from between invidious. The next most popular way to use the Lightning was exchange deposits and withdrawals that came with 32% of the transactions and 20% of the payments were made up of purchases of goods and services that were handled via payment processors or buying gift cards. When looking at the usage in terms of the number of transactions, the report said the micro rewards are dominating the picture. These are transactions that are sent to a user for using a service like a gaming service that rewards the players with Satoshis for playing a game. The report added:

“According to our estimates, individuals sent each other more than 300,000 payments, made more than 200,000 payments for goods and services, and over 100,000 deposits or withdrawals to or from trading services in the first two months of 2022.”

In terms of the future of Lightning, BTC’s most popular layer-2 network said that the network’s usage is still far behind the legacy payment networks like Visa with a strong possibility for huge growth. The potential came from both users using BTC over the LN network and for the network to be used as a payment rail for the fiat currencies. According to them, with the LN, usage can continue to grow even as they are waiting for hyperbitcoinization to surge through the use of the network simply as the payment rail for traditional currencies.