The Lightning Network achieved the 4,000 Bitcoin (BTC) public capacity benchmark, which means $120 million in value is available for peer-to-peer payments.

Specifically, The Lightning Network first initially exceeded the 1,000 BTC threshold in August two years ago, and the 2,000 BTC threshold in July last year. The capacity has witnessed a two-fold increase within the span of 18 months.

Head of CoinCorner, Daniel Scott, reportedly remarked that “we had slow and steady growth with the Lightning capacity to begin, but since Jan[uary] 2021, the uptick has been strong.”

Danny Brewster, CEO of United Kingdom-based Bitcoin exchange Fast Bitcoins additionally claimed that Lightning Network capacity has a likelihood of crossing the 4K barrier a long time ago with private channel metrics not being publicly available.

“With that being said, the constant growth has been a great start for the Lightning Network and I foresee it continuing into the future, as long as all stakeholders, from developers to entrepreneurs building businesses continue to push forward.”

The Lightning Network – functioning as a layer-2 payment protocol developed on Bitcoin’s base layer – reportedly makes it possible to achieve transaction finality in a near-instant manner. 

Lead on-chain analyst for Glassnode, James Check, reportedly revealed that the expansion of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network seems to be moving forward from the “reckless” phase, and into proper experimentation by early adopters.

“As wallet designs and user experience improvements, more kinks can be worked out, and the network will mature. The persistent growth of public Lightning capacity and channel count is a reflection of this vote of growing confidence and growing utilization”. 

Scott reportedly concurred, further disclosing that the positive pattern seems to keep going since there is an increasing number of establishments employing Lightning, with more use cases coming to fruition.