Bitcoin Lightning Network: New Nodes Count Record, Surpassing Bcash

Good news for the Bitcoin Enthusiasts: The Lightning Network (LN) reached a capacity of 10 bitcoins in its implementation of the mainnet, establishing a new record for the network.

Lightning Network hits the capacity of $ 70,000

The new statistics from April 1st show that Lightning Network (LN), which in March reached some milestones for its adoption, can now accept a bitcoin capacity of 10.476 BTC (around $ 70,000).

The latest achievement of LN comes a few days after a new widgets tool, LightningTip, was available to any user wishing to make Lightning payments on a website:

Just released the first beta of LightningTip! I created it to make it easy to accept tips via the Lightning Network on my website. It uses LND as backend to create invoices and monitor which of them were paid.

Source code: https://t.co/bPwqqHqwYB pic.twitter.com/wIMb4a5SsJ

— Michael (@michael1011at) March 29, 2018

wooCommerce, a very popular open-source WordPress e-commerce platform, also announced that it had integrated LN functionality both for Bitcoin and Litecoin payments:

First version of Lightning Network payment gateway using LND for wooCommerce

It supports BTC or LTC at this time. Connect LND to the network you want and select the coin in the menu.https://t.co/q9Qd20fYWc

— João Almeida (@joaodealmeida94) March 30, 2018

Similarly, the VPN provider TorGuard and the Austrian technology company Coinifinty have also added the network to be used in money transfers.

LN exceeds Bitcoin Cash

Last month, Lightning Network launched its mainnet for the use of Bitcoin.

The first beta application in the form of Lightning Daemon (lnd) of Lightning Labs was launched with significant praise, the startup also said they managed to raise $ 2.5 million in a round of funding, which was also supported by the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey.

With currently more than 1500 nodes, 1126 of which are public, the protocol now has a node count higher than Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which is remarkable since the network has been present for only three months.

Lightning Network node count has exceeded Bcash node count. In addition 70%+ of the BCash nodes are hosted on a "Hangzhou Alibaba" servers which you can check here: https://t.co/g8HC8bAkIX https://t.co/iIUyGaftvQ pic.twitter.com/g1tmAMkXPz

— WhalePanda (@WhalePanda) March 27, 2018

The initial idea of ​​Lightning Network was first devised a few years ago as a second layer protocol that would run on the existing Bitcoin blockchain.

The developments in the implementation of SegWit for Bitcoin have reduced the high rates to a fraction of the values ​​of previous weeks. Many popular wallets, such as Blockchain.info, suggested that rates should be only 2 satoshis per byte.

Lightning Network (LN) aims to make micro-transactions a reality so that Bitcoin can be scaled and implemented for regular, everyday transactions.

While many skeptics will doubt the scalability of this technology, it still has strong industry support, such as Jack Dorsey and Litecoin founder Charlie Lee. It will be interesting to observe the evolution of this protocol and how it will innovate the cryptographic space.

With news like these we can conclude that even though Bitcoin Price is going down lately, "behind the scenes" its usage is getting improved in many aspects. So it's safe to assume that Bitcoin is as active as ever.