As more Lightning Network (LN) nodes are added to the Litecoin platform, the cryptocurrency has seen a ramp up especially in its market cap in the past three months.

Despite the crypto winter which has seen the entire crypto economy base shrink in the last 12 months, Litecoin has been able to add over $1 bln to its market in Q1 of 2019 as the number of its LN nodes grows to about 170 (as at this writing) and over 1110 channels.

According to 1ml.com, the seemingly organic rise in node number has increased the network’s capacity to 182LTC (about $11,000). The aftermath growth in the market cap also reflects on the crypto price which now sits at $55 against the $32 range it started 2019 with.

LN nodes effect

LN has been dubbed the only viable scaling solution for Bitcoin presently – with a projected up to 100x scaling potential. As seen in the Bitcoin network which statistics show has seen a rise of late, more LN nodes aid the web decentralization process. It has increased mainstream press attention to the layer2 protocol and somewhat led to the greater utility of Bitcoin LN for payments to the tune of over $3 mln so far. There have been talks of major retail stores considering adopting cryptocurrencies using LN.

It has also helped kickstart global crypto-awareness initiatives like the Bitcoin Lightning Torch which has, in turn, been replicated by other altcoins such as Bitcoin Cash’s Simple Ledger Protocol Torch, Ethereum’s Gitcoin Torch and the EOS Torch.

With more companies accepting it as a payment method – third largest with over 600 merchants (9.76%) behind Bitcoin (25.15%) and Ethereum (11.15%) on Cryptwerk, Litecoin could benefit similarly like Bitcoin provided it sees a rise in LN node number on its network.

We’re working on Litecoin support!!

Should launch early Q4. — Casa (@CasaHODL) September 4, 2018

More LN nodes coming to Litecoin?

No clear factor has been suggested having kept the Litecoin community motivated to have added as much nodes thus far.

Litecoin founder, Charlie Lee, had last September stated that he was not expecting Casa, which has been increasing the spread of LN nodes use for Bitcoin, to add support for Litecoin soon. Despite earlier suggestion to add support by Q4 2019, Jameson Lopp, CTO of Casa, clarified in an AskMeAnything session on Reddit last month that Litecoin has to be added to its Keymaster (multisig wallet) first before it gets to the node. So, it doesn’t seem a particular timeframe has been set yet.

Hence, since there’re alternatives at the moment, getting a good response to the call for more nodes lies squarely with the community members. They would have to show keen interest in the LN concept and that they staunchly believe in Litecoin to get more nodes running. It is worth noting that incentivizing users to achieve this goal is likely to fail after a short while.