According to a survey, the current configuration of Lightning Network nodes and channels is becoming increasingly centralized, with multiple poles being formed across the network. It is worth mentioning that the survey has not yet been reviewed, so it may contain information that does not exactly reflect Lightning's situation.

The team that carried out the analysis gathered data from an 18-month period, from January 2018 to July 2019. The researchers analyzed the payment network in terms of the distribution of knots and money.

The distribution of Bitcoin among all blockchain nodes is completely disproportionate, according to the survey. The Gini index pointed to a value of 0.88, which means that 10% of the network is responsible for keeping 80% of all Bitcoin in the LN.

With the results, the Lightning Network's network was determined to be more centralized than expected. This centralization is a problem because it opens up the possibility of attacks on these most important nodes, which could bring down the entire Lightning Network.

The Lightning Network (LN) is seen by many as one of the solutions to the scalability problem of the Bitcoin network. It is a second-tier solution, operating on a secondary network that can verify and authenticate transactions before they enter Bitcoin blocks. With that, transactions can be much faster and at lower rates. But some researchers are concerned with the centralization of LN.