The 2025 Bitcoin Report by River Exchange is released!

Here are some of my observations:

(1) The tx-per-second count fell. In their PREVIOUS report (2023) they estimated 6.6 million lightning transactions per month. They now estimate 2.42 million LN transactions per month. That's a drop of over 63%.

(2) Volume rose. Their previous report estimated 78.2M USD in monthly transaction volume. They now estimate 286.5M USD in monthly transaction volume. That's a rise of over 72%. They guess this is due to use of LN on exchanges, over 50% of which now support LN; users tend to deposit/withdraw larger amounts to exchanges.

(3) Looks like LN has something similar to a pareto distribution. 80% of volume is done by 14 nodes: "Our November 2024 dataset was made possible by 14 data providers, representing 79.4% of Lightning Network capacity."

But I question what they mean by "Lightning Network capacity." Usually this means "announced capacity," but Acinq and Blockstream are probably among their data providers, and they know about a lot of unannounced channels. I have asked them on twitter for clarification and I hope they reply soon.