Altcoin News: Study: Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Doubles in the First Half of 2019

August 6, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

The solution for scaling the Bitcoin blockchain Lightning Network continues to evolve, increasing the number of nodes and throughput by almost 2 times in the first half of 2019, according to a new study by CoinGecko.

According to them, the transactional capabilities of the network grew by 87% from January 1 to June 30. The number of nodes over the same period increased from 2,298 to 4,576.

Image Credit: CoinGecko

Earlier, analysts drew attention to the fact that the number of payment channels, and with them, available Bitcoin transfers, in the Lightning Network was reduced. Some users find this data to be inconsequential.

“ If you go to http://1ml.com — you see only PUBLIC nodes/channels/capacity. This does NOT include any private channels (mobile apps). Capacity provided by PUBLIC channels is useful to route payments through network, so some capacity is needed, but how much?,” writes the author of the post on Reddit. “LN network arguably has today much more public capacity than needed for me and you to make everyday payments. Real LN capacity is much higher than what 1ml.com reports due to private channels — and recently capacity has been migrating to private channels.”

It is worth noting that CoinGecko data also indicates a decrease in funds available for transactions through the Lightning Network in recent months, while most of the growth occurred in the first months of this year.

In late July, Lightning Labs developers introduced the Lndmon toolkit to track the activity on the Lightning Network.

Author: Marko Vidrih