Bitcoin BTC/USD 2022 experienced a turbulent year, with prices collapsing and cryptocurrencies making headlines. Nevertheless, it was also a year of immense progress for the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
What happened: bitcoin lightning network, a critical scaling protocol that enables near-instant, low-cost payments off-chain, has gone through significant growth and development. We take a look at the Bitcoin Lightning Network and see how it may have changed in 2022.
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Lightning Network is a revolutionary technology bitcoin (or satoshi, the smallest denomination of bitcoin) for transactions. By increasing the capacity of the network, users enjoy the benefits of faster payment speeds and larger transaction volumes, which come with lower fees.
Since its creation in 2018, the Lightning Network has seen immense acceptance beyond its critics’ expectations, with successful deployments in June at 4,000 BTC capacity and the like. El SalvadorIsle of Man, and Gibraltar, even a bitcoin influencer udi wertheimerThose who had previously expressed doubts about the network’s viability were forced to acknowledge its “success”.
The Lightning Network is completely decentralized and improves the scalability of bitcoin. The publicly visible liquidity capacity has increased from 1,058 bitcoins to more than 4,771 bitcoins in 2022. According to the 1ml.com Lightning Network tracker, the number of Lightning Network channels grew an impressive 80%, from 37,298 to 67,339 channels. Additionally, the number of public Lightning Network nodes grew by 88%, from 8,295 to 15,636 nodes (though the growth rate slowed in the second half of the year).
New Protocol Technologies: This year, Lightning Labs unveiled Taro, a protocol proposal To allow minting, sending and receiving of assets for Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Taro leverages the latest bitcoin protocol upgrade, Taproot, to enable the issuance of practically any type of asset on the bitcoin blockchain that remains backed by the immutable security of bitcoin’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism. This opens the door for enhanced use cases and enhanced functionality on the network, such as issuing stablecoins, stocks and bonds on top of the bitcoin protocol.
Impregnable Technologies Unveiled the world’s first web browser powered by Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. This peer-to-peer browser provides a comprehensive set of communication, data transfer and payment tools without any centralized intermediaries. These include end-to-end encrypted messaging, video calls, collaboration platforms, decentralized identity management, data storage and giving users the opportunity to monetize their data.
last but not least, value-4-value, an innovative approach to content publishing that rewards the creator with value after customers have enjoyed the content. Over 10,000 content creators have already applied value-4-value to their podcasts by leveraging the Lightning Network and using solutions like Lightning Addresses and Bolt-12 Invoices.
Rene Pickhardt, bitcoin lightning network developer explained benzinga The major breakthrough for the Lightning Network was in March when it developed a new approach to vastly improve Lightning payment reliability.
Pickhardt’s research suggested that approaching the payment segmentation process as an optimization problem provides both reliability and cost-efficiency, leading to better results.
futureA new report from Arcane Research titled “The State of Lightning” Says Bitcoin Could Be One of the Lightning Network Astonishing 700 million users by 2030.
According to this report, gaming and streaming video and audio will be major use cases for the Lightning Network, as will streaming services. Spotify And netflix Using it for micropayments to offer per-minute or per-second streaming services. With a use like this, the Lightning Network could revolutionize the digital payments industry – and change the way we consume media.
price action: At the time of writing, bitcoin was trading at $16,842, up 0.02%, according to Benzinga Pro Data,
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