The Bitcoin Lightning Network marked another milestone. Total public capacity had surpassed over 5,000 BTC for the first time in history, continuing the growing trend of 2022. This new milestone pushes the capacity and promise of the Bitcoin Lightning Network even further. As always, there was a reason behind the big push.
The development of Bitcoin is accelerating
The continued development of the bitcoin network is a big part of why the digital asset remains so valuable today. Being the largest decentralized network in the space, there are always developers looking for new ways to take advantage of the bitcoin network’s offerings and push it further into the mainstream.
Lightning Labs is a development company that continues to have a strong focus on bitcoin development and was the originator of the new all-time high capacity Lightning Network. The developer had expanded the channel capacity of River Financial and Loop, allowing the network to be able to accommodate even more BTC. It also follows the introduction of the new Taro protocol, the code of which was released for public dissection last week as Lightning Labs continues to expand the capabilities of the bitcoin network.
Lightning network reaches new milestone | Source: Arcane Research
The Bitcoin Lightning Network is also becoming increasingly popular among BTC users. MicroStrategy, which has a large investment position in BTC, made headlines by posting a job posting looking for a full-time lighting network engineer. Apparently, the company is looking to build a Lightning Network-based SaaS platform for e-commerce and enterprise use cases.
The Taro protocol, mentioned above, strives to enable developers to mint, send, and receive new tokens on the bitcoin blockchain. Take the example of Ethereum ERC tokens. It will also expand the possibilities of NFTs on the bitcoin blockchain, while enabling the creation of stablecoins based on the bitcoin blockchain.
BTC price settles above $20,000 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
The Lightning Network is also increasingly present in crypto-payment services due to its speed. El Salvador had adopted the Lightning Network to make it easier to pay with BTC in the country, and digital payment provider Strike raised $80 million in September to expand its Lightning Network-based payment solutions for merchants.
Layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network are also expected to be more important to the bitcoin network in the future. Cardano founder Charles Hoskison recently revealed that he expects the majority of BTC will likely exist outside of the bitcoin network within the next five years and be wrapped in these Layer 2 solutions.
Featured image from Coindesk, charts from Arcane Research and TradingView.com
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