Bitcoin Lightning Network Reaches All-Time High Capacity

Efforts to improve the scalability of Bitcoin appear to be bearing fruit as the Lightning Network, a second layer off-chain scalability solution on the network designed to handle vast transaction throughputs without resulting in high prices has recorded an important milestone.

According to data from 1ML, the Lightning Network now has a total of 4,039 nodes at press time, of which a total of 2,914 have public IP addresses.

This marks the first time that the Lightning Network has exceeded 4,000 nodes, at a time when its total network capacity now stands at an all-time high of 134.42 BTC, barely two months after the network capacity figure crossed 100 BTC for the first time ever.

Following a September summit held in Melbourne, Australia, Lightning Labs developer Alex Bosworth revealed on Nov. 12, 2018, that a total of thirty changes would be implemented in the next version of the Lightning Network including multi-path payments, dual-funded channels, and hidden destinations, among other features.

It will be recalled that earlier this week, Lightning Labs co-founder Olaoluwa Osuntokun was featured on the latest Forbes 30-Under-30 list after the startup successfully raised more than $2.5 million for its commercial implementation of the Lightning Network to make bitcoin a more viable means of carrying out microtransactions in the manner of Venmo or Cash App.Stellar's Interest in Lightning.

Earlier in 2018, Stellar also revealed that it has plans to implement the framework on its own network before the year runs out.

In a blog post in January, the company revealed that it had a long-standing interest in LN implementation.

"We've noted the market demand for more private channel transactions on Stellar, and we will integrate Lightning in 2018. [] 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."