Bitcoin [BTC]: Lightning Network surpasses 6000 nodes; network capacity up by 15%

Bitcoin has recently been on the positive side of news, and is one of many cryptocurrencies surging in the ecosystem. On the back of the recent bullish pump which saw the price valuation of all top cryptocurrencies experience positive movement, Bitcoin witnessed a low of $3400 and then surged to a high of $3700, before settling at the current price of $3650.90 at press time.

With this recent development in value and also a week of tremendous Twitter spotlight, Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is hitting new highs and records across the board in terms of mainframe implementation. Specifically, in the case of Lightning Torch, a relay transaction being bounced between nodes has already gained active support from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in what became a widely-publicized event last week.

According to data released from the monitoring resource 1ML.com, the website confirmed that the number of active nodes, channels and overall transaction capacity experienced over the month on the Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, are all higher than ever in its thirteen-month since its inception.

In the past 30 days, the network has seen impressive growth in terms of numbers which are as follows,

Number of Lightning nodes: 6,085; up 14.55%

Number of Lightning channels: 24,647; up 27.2%

Network capacity: 656.94 bitcoin (BTC); up 15%

The numbers can be further explained better with the help of charts regarding the network active traffic.

The blue demographic column in the graph explains the number of nodes with channels the Lightning network has witnessed and the green column the number of nodes without channels. With channels, the number of active nodes is 3051, whereas without channel it is only 62.

The graph above demonstrates the number of active channels per node where the blue line indicates no. of channels active in the 90th percentile strength which is at a number of 30 whereas the violet indicates the average strength overall and the number of channels being at 16.

The increase in network size comes as Bitcoin’s “layer 2” payment protocol Lightning Network (also known as “Lightning” or “LN”) continues to grow at a very rapid pace and gain publicity beyond the Bitcoin technical community to be a more user-driven interactive network to get the people familiarized with how the system works.