2023-05-10 15:31:22
The number of transactions on the Lightning Network has skyrocketed due to Bitcoin mempool overload.
As we reported a few days ago, the Bitcoin network was brutally overloaded. Roughly half a million transactions were stuck over the weekend, and this might only be circumvented by using the Lightning Network. The number of transactions on the Layer 2 network has skyrocketed, this was reported in particular by Bitfinex, which is one of the first crypto exchanges to implement BTC transactions through LN.
The exchange decided to use Lightning back in 2019, when very few people were willing to send bitcoins through it. Back then there were less than 5,000 nodes and less than 32,000 channels globally, while today there are more than 18,000 nodes and almost 80,000 channels.
With the congestion of the network, the fee for each transaction skyrocketed, and the average time for validating transactions also increased drastically.
If someone does not want to reach deep into their pockets for a tip, then they are forced to switch to Lightning now.
Bitcoin’s Layer 2 network enables instant transactions at almost negligible cost, and it also has no real capacity limits. The current 18,000 nodes can handle far more transactions than the miners on the chain can handle, and can even handle the massive demand we’re experiencing today.
If the validation of all transactions in the mempool can take nearly 24 hours, with the help of LN they can be validated in minutes, but at most a few hours.
Plus there are still close to 400,000 in the mempool there is a transactionwhich will certainly not be validated within 24 hours due to the low fees.
Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino said:
“Lightning is a good place to alleviate the congestion problems of the Bitcoin network. At Bitfinex we have seen 11,000 transactions in the last 30 days and I expect this to only increase. We need more exchanges and more exchange users to push Lightning to benefit from faster speeds and much lower costs. Blockstream’s Liquid network is also a good secondary layer that can help in situations where the main network is overloaded”.
On the one hand, these figures show that the use of LN is really on the rise. On the other hand, if they were used en masse, the Bitcoin mempool would probably not be overloaded.
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