Bitcoin Lightning Network (BTC LN) Passes a Big Benchmark in Surpassing 8,000 Nodes

If you follow crypto news, you have certainly heard about the Bitcoin Lightning Network. This off-chain scaling solution for Bitcoin (BTC) was launched last year and it has been growing a lot lately. Now, the LN has reached the landmark of 8,000 nodes, a proof that the service is finally breaking into the mainstream.

With over 8,000 nodes, the BTC Lightning Network is up 8% from last month, an impressive growth rate. At the moment, the network boasts the capacity of 1062 BTC ($5.37 million USD), just below its recent all-time record of 1080 BTC. With the use of this technology, you can make transactions that will be almost free and much faster than if you decided to use the main Bitcoin network.

Part of why the technology is so successful at the moment is because the LN has to receive a lot of attention lately from important figures in the industry. Even figures like Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and the Square app, have endorsed the initiative.

Also, the Lightning Torch, a marketing initiative in which famous people keep making transactions to each other, is making people aware of the existence of the LN this year.

In fact, the LN was pretty poor when it launched. It had several bugs and lacked important features, so many people criticized it last year. However, time showed people that the LN could survive and become something worthy.

How To Make The Lightning Network Mainstream? Use Must Be Unconscious, Breez CEO Affirms

While the milestone is important and it can be understood as something that shows how far the LN has come, the CEO of Breez, Roy Sheinfeld, a Lightning wallet payment platform, has recently affirmed that this is not enough.

According to him, the experimental nature of the technology will prevent further adoption. The only way to make the BTC Lightning Network really mainstream is to make people use it in an unconscious way. To simply use it without thinking whether they are using it or not. There is a need to reimagine the network to be used by non-technical users.

Breez is trying to do just that. The app was created in order to remove all the technical issues that can get in the way of using this solution. For instance, when you use it, you do not need to set up nodes or channels, just use it for transactions.

The product is fully non-custodial and requires no configuration, which the CEO believes to be one of its strongest points. Automating the use of technology is the first step to turn it into a huge hit. According to Sheinfeld, when you can buy a pizza with the app without thinking about it, that is when the technology has succeeded.

Jack Dorsey wants to integrate his famous Square cash app with the Lightning Network too, which can boost its adoption a lot. Square Crypto, a spin-off app, is already being created, which will give the LN a major boost in popularity and usage.