Is Lightning finally reverting its negative trend in terms of channels and nodes?
In August, according to
BitcoinVisuals, channels reached a 3-year minimum of around 50200. Until the end of September, it grew again to over 54000, which would be quite a nice growth of 8% in only two months. Nodes grew from 15200 to 16800 according to that website.
Unfortunately the stats seem to have not updated since then.
1ml has real-time statistics but they have slightly lower figures (<50.000 channels, >12000 nodes), so they have probably a different view of the network. And they unfortunately don't provide historic data.
According to
Bitcoin Magazine Pro, the capacity in BTC is increasing since March 2024, after having dropped in 2023 and early 2024.
Coingate (a payment processor) reported an
increase in merchant payments of 28% compared to 2023.
So it's perhaps too early to celebrate because the data picture isn't complete, but the usage may be increasing nicely.
(Unfortunately neither talkimg nor imgbb works for me at the moment, I would have liked to include a chart pic.)
The Max Flow metric is interesting, but as it depends on the Bitcoin price, in my opinion it's a good measure for usability but not for adoption.
