BTC Lightning Network Shows Strong Growth Despite The ‘’Crypto Winter’’

Despite the long bear market and the recent market crash, the capacity of the Bitcoin Lightning Network has gone beyond $2 million over the weekend so in our latest bitcoin news we find out more how the ‘’crypto winter’’ fits into the story.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network has shown massive growth this year (2018) and as of yesterday, December 23, the node channels that support the Lightning scaling protocol had successfully facilitated 496.9 BTC which is an amount worth of $2 million.

Also, the number of channels that are connecting nodes has also grown a lot over the past two months reaching up to 14,353 unique channels.

As you already know, scalability is one of the biggest and most difficult issues for the Bitcoin network. Many improvements were made over the past ten years but sometimes the ecosystem cannot manage with the massive growth in the number of users and transactions.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network which is a second layer payment protocol on top of the BTC blockchain can help solve the problems with scalability by the so-called payment channels. The payment channels are a quick way to conduct a transaction between multiple users without saving them on the blockchain unless the channel is closed.

In 2018 we can see many crypto-related businesses that are profitable despite the crypto winter. For example, there are still ATM machines being put up every day around the world and, mining companies that recorded a $13.5 million for Q3.

However, this year wasn’t the best business year for many other companies as well, especially companies that produced mining equipment which are now forced to shut down or sell their goods for a ridiculously low price.