Another Milestone For The Lightning Network

A search engine which the whole purpose is dedicated to the ins and outs of the lightning network, 1ML.com, has said that the second layer off-chain scaling solutions for Bitcoin has reached a new milestone, as it passed four thousand nodes for the first time at the current time of writing.

Bitcoin’s second layer solution was created to enable payment quicker and more affordable, the Lightning Network has taken the digital currency space by storm in a short period of time. Currently, the mainnet network limit was just over 123 Bitcoin which is equal to $714.407 with a total of around 11,910 channels.

The Lightning Network is different from the Bitcoin network. This is due to not every Bitcoin transaction to be required to be recorded on the Bitcoin network. The Lightning Network has nodes involved which operate on the network to facilitate the transfer of Bitcoin among them. The network is constructed from building blocks referred to as payment channels.

In terms of speed, efficiency and scalability it is miles ahead of the Bitcoin network. The Lightning Network only logs the opening and closing balance of transactions until one of the participating nodes will actively shut down the channel.

After a channel is shut down, the blockchain will only record the final states or the closing balance. As a result of this, the saves a lot of data from getting stored in the main blockchain and wasting the data space on the digital ledger.

As the transactions take place off the chain it also helps in keeping the time it takes to transmit data from the channel to a minimum. Even though the network is still in its early stage the sturdiness of it and scaling ‘prowess’ has impressed many in the crypto space.

Earlier this week, the infrastructure lead at Lightning Network, Alex Bosworth tweeted that the upgrades which had been agreed to be implemented by the Lightning community. These improvements include multiple paths for payments, splicing and dual-funded channels amongst other things. There have been a total of 30 changes which have been accepted to go live with the next version of the Lightning Network.

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