For years, Bitcoiners pushed exchanges to adopt Lightning.

And guess what? It worked. Public Lightning volume is up 266% in about a year.

A few interesting insights from our new nostr:nprofile1qqsrtv3u6qkj6a09tnhr3l0wy67g9uw3t57ftqyqpvztpk3wmd6306s92qxwz report:

Our previous Lightning research in 2023 showed a 1212% increase in transactions.

Many of these were low value, as people experimented with new apps & business models.

Now, a new wave of bigger volume has come in, driven by exchanges.

We used the same methodology for our estimates as in 2023, but instead of having data on 52% of public capacity, we now got up to 79.4%

A massive thank you to Acinq, nostr:nprofile1qqsyv47lazt9h6ycp2fsw270khje5egjgsrdkrupjg27u796g7f5k0s8jq7y6, Bitfinex, nostr:nprofile1qqsfwyw34w5qdgazshlnap73wkgzcte9qaqcvrvuvkgrez67scltmqglmz585, C=, nostr:nprofile1qqsf5wdlsd7gdrtpakxvu6jv0g8tjm67t0xqs2kk4lw4f9ktv99z87c9ekpvj, Kraken, LQWD, NiceHash, OKX, Cyberdyne, Sunny Sarah, nostr:nprofile1qqstaag5h4vv3nh2f04eu6uy4rvc8y6l003x7j0pfhmgpx83hfjp2ms0tudgq, and nostr:nprofile1qqstu8vf099ljt09m4jvres0dgk8ps2q4wkfjvjp3lhrp3wxxllfg7gnp0y44 for sharing data.

The Lightning industry continues to grow

We’ve updated our map, adding 46 new companies and removing 12.

We expect Lightning to continue growing:

- On-chain fees remain low, slowing adoption.

- USDT on Lightning may increase activity.

- Dozens of scaling proposals continue to build on Lightning.

More Lightning + Bitcoin adoption trends in our new report 👇

https://blog.river.com/bitcoin-adoption-2025/