Current statistics show that the mainnet Lighting was achieved a record node count and can now have a capacity of 10.476 BTC or $70,000. The lightning network’s ever-increasing presence came much more into prominence following the launch of LightningTip, a widget tool which lets anyone accept Lightning payments on the web.
“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,” said Michael, creator of LightningTip.
In similar news, WooCommerce - the popular open source WordPress e-commerce platform also announced that it had added the Lightning Network (LN) functionality for both Bitcoin and Litecoin payments.
It is worth noting that it was last month when Lightning made its debut for mainnet Bitcoin use. Its first beta implementation dubbed as Lightning Labs’ Lightning Daemon (lnd) opened to considerable acclaim. The startup also managed to rack up $2.5 million in funding, a huge chunk of which came from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Currently, LN has over 1500 nodes out of which 1126 are public nodes. It is also astonishing that the protocol has surpassed the node count of BCH (Bitcoin Cash) which was introduced to do LN’s work. In fact, even though BCH continues to boaster itself as a cheaper and faster version of Bitcoins, it has now become less prevalent in comparison to Bitcoin Lightning Network nodes.
Also, just a couple of weeks ago we saw how Bitcoin transaction fees were brought down to a fraction of its previous cost following SegWit adoption for the digital currency. For example, Blockchain.info - a popular consumer wallet just cut down its fees to just two satoshis per byte.
However, all these advancements in usability are still not reflecting itself on Bitcoin’s market value. Currently, the BTC/USD is still trailing inside the $7000 mark, and we are yet to see any bullish tendencies.