Photo: Pavlos Giorkas / Flickr
The mainnet implementation of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network (LN) has attained a new milestone of 4000 nodes for the very first time. Lightning Network, as we know, is the second layer off chain scalability solution of the Bitcoin network. The network is designed to cater to a huge number of Bitcoin users while keeping the transaction costs low.
According to the data resource 1ML, the number of nodes for the Lightning Network at the press-time is 4036. Of these 2911 nodes are currently public. Furthermore, the network capacity currently stands at 123 BTC. Just two months back in September, the Lightning Network capacity for the first time crossed 100 BTC.
Over the last few months, a lot of development around the Lightning Network implementation is taking place. Bitcoin developers are currently working over a more robust infrastructure instead of focusing much on the user interface at the moment. In September, during a summit in Australia, Lightning Network lead developer Alex Bosworth talked about the key improvements the community decided to implement.
A number of third-party developers have started experimenting with the Lightning Network (LN). Earlier this year in May, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz successfully made BTC payments for his pizza through the lightning network. Remember, Hanyecz was the first person to pay for pizza through Bitcoins (BTC) back in 2010.
Similarly, last month, Richardo Reis tested the BTC payment for Coca-Cola through the Lightning Network. Reis also released a video demonstrating how the complete transaction took place.
Also, in September, developer Alex Bosworth released the concept of “submarine swaps” to facilitate seamless transactions between the Lightning Network and the Bitcoin network. This interoperability solution takes inspiration from atomic swaps for seamless fund transfers between off-chain lightning and on-chain bitcoin platform.
Stellar Likely to Add Lightning by 2019
As the entire crypto industry is undergoing the hurdles of scalability, Bitcoin is not the only digital currency to consider implementing the Lightning Network. Earlier this year, Stellar officials highlighted the Lightning requirement. They said that “the market demand for more private channel transactions.”
The blog notes that “Lightning will have a huge positive effect on Stellar’s long-term scalability and security. We’ve been aware of Lightning’s potential for Stellar for a while, and we’ve recently collaborated with Stellar advisor and Bitcoin Core developer Jeremy Rubin to optimize our implementation.”
