So, it turns out that the main huge flow of funds is going to the exchanges Binance and OKX, and it could also be going to the Kraken exchange, but they have closed the option for opening incoming channels.

Indirectly generating income is the top node Boltz, which is the service for exchanging Bitcoin on-chain to Lightning and Lightning to on-chain.

Also, my share of local balance for private channels has grown significantly. So I can assume the following scenarios for why this is happening.

Someone is opening private channels to me and paying on Binance. This is probably done because Binance by default has whitelists for nodes that can open incoming channels to them, while other nodes in the network cannot open those channels on Binance. They only have the option to work through intermediary nodes, including mine. But that's not the main flow; otherwise, I would see private nodes in the top indirectly generating income. Well, Boltz is at the top.

So it seems the main scenario is that people are funding their accounts on Binance through the Bitcoin Lightning Network, using either wallets integrated with Boltz, where you can pay #Lightning invoices through Bitcoin on-chain, or directly using the #Boltz service since they have a website. They pay Lightning invoices issued by the #Binance exchange, settling with on-chain Bitcoin. Why this is happening, you can guess for yourself. Maybe it's done for privacy because on-chain Bitcoin is easily analyzed, and the Binance exchange can ask various inconvenient questions for every incoming Bitcoin on-chain transaction, while Bitcoin Lightning Network transactions have no connection to Bitcoin on-chain transactions since all payments come only from the nearest channels. And where they came from, there's no information due to the privacy of #Bitcoin #LightningNetwork

#LNBiG #Stats #OKX #privacy #LN