If Bitcoin will become a fully-fledged alternative to currently existing payment systems, it will obviously need to be able to compete with fiat as of now, it’s not even close. To understand the magnitude of the situation, simply compare Bitcoin’s minuscule 7 tps to Visa’s average of 24,000, and its peak capacity of around 50,000 transactions per second.

What is lightening Network:

It enables fast transactions between participating nodes and has been touted as a solution to the Bitcoin scalability problem. Lightning Network (Bitcoin’s second layer payment protocol) has seen significant growth last year

The first Lightning implementation developed by Lightning Labs launched in beta in March 2018. The other two implementations developed by ACINQ and Blockstream followed in late March and late June respectively.

Moreover, there are other implementations currently in development, Finally, it is important to mention that the recent tests have proven that the three major implementations are fully inter-operable, which means they can seamlessly work with one another.

The Lightning Network (bitcoin second layer) has grown significantly in the past year, it now has more than 5,424 nodes with active channels, 19,798 channels and a total network capacity of 498.060 BTC ($1,797,937.48)

On average, each node has nearly 12 channels open and each channel has an average capacity of $110.

One entity LNBIG.com has 20 public nodes totaling the capacity of 365.6 BTC (~$1.3 million), representing 64% of the network’s capacity and other the ten largest LN nodes currently have 38% of the network’s capacity

Current Bitcoin Lightening Capacity

#LightningNetwork

5,424 nodes (2,621 with active channels)

19,798 channels

498.060 BTC capacity ($1,797,937.48)

new in the past 24h:

30 nodes, 491 channels

median node capacity: 0.012 BTC ($43.28)