Lightning Letter #1

Lightning Network adoption continues to reach record highs.

In this newsletter, I will be chronicling the latest adoption metrics from across the industry, as well as the new ideas and stories from the builders bringing the Lightning Network to life.

Lightning Metrics

Over 7,000 Podcasts are now on the Lightning Network

Each month, hundreds of new podcasts add value blocks to their show splits, enabling those creators to earn sats on the Lightning Network using Podcasting 2.0 apps like Fountain and dozens of others.

Today, over 7,000 podcasts are now able to receive sats from listeners over the Lightning Network.

Stacker News Broke All Record Highs in May

Stacker News hit new all-time highs in users, pageviews, sats earned, and items created in May. Stacker News launched 11 months ago, and has seen new monthly records in almost every single one.

The site got 50,802 pageviews in January, and 197,956 pageviews in May. That’s almost 300% growth in just 4 months.

Zero Fee Routing Routes 10+ BTC Per Day

Zero Fee Routing (ZFR) is the pseudonymous operator of one of the world’s largest routing nodes. He has taken an approach of charging no routing fees as the marginal cost for routing transactions on the Lightning Network is essentially zero.

This strategy has helped ZFR become a highly connected node on the network, and leads to higher than usual routing volumes. This week, ZFR announced on Twitter they had routed over 10 BTC/day. This means they are turning over their entire public capacity (63 BTC) every single week.

While ZFR doesn’t earn directly from routing fees, they do lease inbound capacity to other nodes on the network for a fee. In May, they earned 2.5-3M sats from selling liquidity as explained on their recent Stacker News AMA.

For more info on ZFR, I did a podcast episode with him in April.

LN Markets Routed 33.58 BTC In May

LN Markets is a Lightning derivatives exchange with one of the top 50 largest nodes on the Lightning Network. With 29 BTC of public capacity, they routed 33.58 BTC in May, which means they turned over their entire public capacity in a single month.

This turnover rate is 4x slower than ZFR above, but LN Markets does charge small routing fees on some channels and operates an exchange connected to their Lightning node. In other words, the LN Markets node isn’t optimized for routing the maximum amount of BTC possible.

Still, these two nodes offer interesting data points on the efficiency of large routing nodes.

VIDA Topped 6 Million Sats Earned

VIDA is a new platform that lets you earn for your time. Users can both paywall their inbox to earn for answering messages, and can paywall their phone to earn money whenever someone wants to call them. To date, users have earned over 6,000,000 sats on the platform, and in just the last week over 500,000 sats have been earned.

Amboss Matched 16 BTC of Liquidity on Magma

Amboss launched their Lightning node liquidity marketplace this spring, and has already matched 16 BTC of liquidity for Lightning node operators. As a result, users have earned 4.13M sats for opening 399 Lightning channels.

In the last two weeks, they have seen over 5 BTC of matched liquidity.

Lightning Interviews

Paul Itoi

Paul Itoi has built two of the most popular Lightning applications to date, Sphinx Chat and Stakwork. These platforms already enable thousands of people to chat and earn over the Lightning Network, and Paul’s vision for where these platforms will go next is incredible.

In our wide-ranging conversation, Paul and I discussed the concept of earning Bitcoin for completing tasks, how AIs and humans can work together to truly build a world computer, and how decentralized knowledge graphs can help people learn faster than ever.

A few highlights from my conversation with Paul:

Michael Levin

Michael Levin is a Product Manager at Lightning Labs, the company building tools to bring Bitcoin to billions.

In our conversation, Michael and I discussed the dual adoption curves of Bitcoin, we explored the entire suite of Lightning Labs products, and we discussed Taro and the future of the Lightning Network.

A few highlights from my conversation with Michael:

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