All credit for the data published in this post goes to the great folks at Arcane Research. One way to help them is to jump on their email list. They put out some great tools and products.
This post will look at some of the key data points and ideas from the Arcane report for the 1st quarter of 2022.
Here they show you the strengthening growth of the public capacity of the network itself. This is BTC pledged if you will, but it does not capture the entire picture as many run private nodes not captured here.
This next graph takes a look at the number of users worldwide that now have literal and direct access to the Bitcoin Lightning Network. It's pretty clear the Cash App is a major player here in adoption moving forward.
The 3rd chart shows the strong accelerating growth of both the number of transactions and dollar payment volume.
Now we can see the growth in payments volume when stripping out trading and deposits. You can see that the network is gaining momentum with transactions and value moving for things outside of the heavy hitters typically. There are other uses of Lightning such as users earning sats for walking and other activities.
This is the distribution of Lightning payments by type.
Figure 6 demonstrates that trading transactions are actually the smallest main category of use for BTC Lightning currently.
