Lightning Finally Matters, and Nobody Is Paying Attention

Routed Lightning Network volume crossed $2 billion in March, per data from 1ML and Amboss. That number has been approximately doubling annually for the last three years. The trajectory is, finally, the kind of exponential that makes Lightning an actual payment network rather than a proof-of-concept. The crypto press, including this publication, has mostly been looking the other way.

What changed

Several things, most of which happened in the last 18 months:

• Taproot assets went live on Lightning, enabling stablecoin routing
• Channel liquidity management tools matured to the point that non-specialists could operate nodes
• El Salvador's Chivo wallet was replaced by a series of open-source alternatives with better UX
• A number of payment processors — Strike, OpenNode, and several smaller competitors — consolidated the merchant-side plumbing
• Central and South American remittance corridors quietly became the network's dominant transaction category

The stablecoin point is the one that has moved the needle most. Lightning-native USDT routing, enabled by Taproot assets, has grown from nearly zero in mid-2024 to approximately 40% of routed volume today. Users are sending dollars over Lightning. The fact that the underlying payment rail is denominated in Bitcoin is, from their perspective, a technical detail.

"The Lightning network was always going to win by making Bitcoin the rail, not the payload. That happened in the last year, and most observers missed it." — Jack Mallers, Strike CEO

Why the crypto industry missed this

Lightning has been the subject of more skepticism per unit of delivered usage than any other crypto infrastructure project in the last decade. There are reasons for the skepticism — the network's early UX was bad, the channel management was unforgiving, the payment failure modes were opaque. But the skepticism lasted well past the point at which the objections had been materially addressed.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is that the payments use case has not been the fashionable narrative for Bitcoin in several years. The industry's attention has been on store-of-value, digital gold, ETFs, treasury management. Payments — low-margin, operationally demanding, reliant on last-mile integration — fell off the narrative agenda. Lightning kept shipping regardless.

The remittance story is the live one

The statistic that most surprises me when I spend time with the Lightning infrastructure builders is the geographic composition of the routed volume. North America is a minority. Central America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and parts of Southeast Asia are where the growth is concentrated. These are corridors where the traditional remittance rails charge 5-10% per transaction and take days to settle. Lightning charges basis points and settles in seconds.

The volume implications of this are substantial. Global remittance flows are approximately $800 billion annually. If Lightning captures 5% of that, it becomes the dominant Bitcoin-denominated application by volume. The trajectory — $2 billion in a single month — is not inconsistent with getting there.

What I would watch from here

A few things:

• The Strike and OpenNode acquisition pattern — who buys them, and at what valuation
• The pace at which Tether-on-Lightning volume passes native BTC volume (it is close)
• Regulatory response, particularly in corridors where the existing remittance incumbents are politically connected
• Whether a major consumer wallet — Cash App, PayPal, a Latin American neobank — makes Lightning the default settlement rail rather than an option

The uncomfortable observation for everyone who said Lightning would not work

I include myself here. Many people in this industry, including many who still write about Bitcoin for a living, concluded years ago that Lightning would not become a meaningful payment rail. The evidence available in 2019 and 2020 supported that view. The evidence available in 2026 does not. The technology has been working for longer, with more volume, and with fewer catastrophic failures than the skeptics predicted. At some point, the appropriate intellectual response is to update. We should have been updating sooner. I am trying to start now.