Compared to the Bitcoin transactions sent “onchain”, the Bitcoin transactions on the Lightning Network are not publicly broadcasted to everyone on the planet nor replicated in every single full node. That’s the why and how of the Lightning Network. This privacy aspect of LN makes it notably harder for anyone to asses the number of transactions and the volumes transferred, so we have to rely on hints provided by various operators that are integrated with and use LN in some way. Hence this post is not a comprehensive analysis, but mostly a collection of couple interesting data points.

First, let me share a bit about myself. In the last 2 days I made around 100 Bitcoin transactions over Lightning Network. I’m playing Lightning Crush on my phone, now stuck at Level 60, and you get rewarded sats for each level in exchange for ignoring ads. The sats you can immediately withdraw to any wallet. I also listened to podcasts on Breez and streamed some per-minute sats to the pod hosts and then I both spent and earned a couple sats on Stacker News. For most of the transactions I paid literally 0 fee to get sats into my non-custodial wallet. Also note here that I got all those sats in a non-KYC way, either winning in the games, or buying through our local p2p reputation-based LN exchange and that one time when my friend paid me back for dinner. All this is to say that a single user with their phone is an unstoppable force that can be an epicenter of hundreds or thousands of transactions.

At the time of writing LN has (according to Moody Dashboard):

• Total Capacity: 2,142.61 BTC
• Capacity Value: $82.3M
• Total Nodes: 13,353
• Total Channels: 61,313
• Tor Capacity: 1,532.56 BTC
• Percentage Tor Capacity: 71.5%
• Tor Nodes: 8,101

And here’s a summary of other interesting numbers that I found recently.

• Wallet of Satoshi publishes the number of transactions online with over 1.6M total transactions and shared fee metrics
• Breez wallet recently posted a secretive tweet hinting at over 1M total transactions
• LN Markets: the team shared that they had $200 million of volume since launch
• Bitaroo exchange shared that they had $50 million in the last 9 months
• Alex Bosworth, mentioned in Twitter Spaces call that he is earning $4,500 per month from routing fees on his nodes. That said, he’s the bos of routing.
• Ryan Gentry recently published a really nice newsletter that shows many more details and numbers.
• Kevin Rooke put together a cool article with further analysis and thoughts on the usage.

I think it’s safe to say that Lightning Network is gaining some notable traction.