New Record For the Lightning Network – Mainnet Reaches 1,000 Active Nodes

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Lightning Network, the scalability solution for Bitcoin, is reaching a new milestone. This time, Lightning Network’s mainnet has reached 1,000 active nodes for the first time in its history. At the same time, there were registered 1863 open channels. It is expected that during this year the LN will be available.

Lightning Network New Milestone

Cryptocurrency developers are working on the Lightning Network in order to allow Bitcoin’s Blockchain to scale. LN is a second layer protocol that works atop of Bitcoin’s blockchain and allows the network to process the transactions off the chain. That allows faster transaction times and the reduction of fees.

This is not the first milestone that the Lightning Network registers. Some weeks ago, we wrote that Laszlo Hanyecz, who performed Bitcoin’s first transaction, bought a Pizza Using Lightning Network.

He said about this milestone:

“I wanted to try out a real trade using lightning network. I don’t know any pizza places near me that accept lightning bitcoin yet, but a friend from London agreed to do it and he sub contracted out the pizza delivery to a local shop.”

According to some experts, the speed of developments of the Lightning Network this year may allow it to be ready before time. The official release could be done very soon, helping Bitcoin’s network to scale. At the same time, its launch would have an important impact on the cryptocurrency market, that can’t recover from a bad starting this year.

At the same time that the Bitcoin Lightning Network keeps improving, other on-chain solutions may be under serious threat. We are talking about Bitcoin Cash, which is a hard fork of Bitcoin and offers an on-chain solution for the scalability problem that Bitcoin faces.

Microsoft Supports Lightning Network

Microsoft has also shown its support for the Lightning Network. As reported by CoinStaker, Microsoft has decided to offer support to Bitcoin against Bitcoin Cash scaling solution. The statement released by the company reads as follows:

“While some blockchain communities have increased on-chain transaction capacity (e.g. block size increases), this approach generally degrades the decentralized state of the network and cannot reach the millions of transactions per second the system would generate at world-scale.”

If Bitcoin becomes a worldwide cryptocurrency, used and accepted everywhere, the 8MB solution proposed by Bitcoin Cash supporters will not be enough to process the increased traffic, and another hard fork would be needed.

“To overcome these technical barriers, we are collaborating on decentralized Layer 2 protocols that run atop these public blockchains to achieve global scale, while preserving the attributes of a world class DID system,” says the statement.

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Image Courtesy of Pixabay