Litecoin Lightning Network surpasses 100 active nodes

An update from Franklyn Richards, a founding member and director of the Litecoin foundation, has revealed that the Litecoin Lightning Network (LN) has now surpassed 100 active nodes.

Litecoin was released as an open-source client on GitHub by its creator Charlie Lee in 2011. The Litecoin network then went live in October 2011, as a fork of the Bitcoin Core client.

The Lightning Network is a solution to scaling issues within the cryptosphere. In short, it is hard to process a lot of transactions per second. So, the Lightning Network adds another layer that users create between payment channels. These channels can exist for as long as they are needed, and since they can be set up between two people, transactions occur a lot faster.

Franklyn Richards currently serves as a director for the Litecoin foundation and is one of the cryptocurrency’s founding members. His recent update has revealed that Litecoin’s Lightning Network has managed to surpass 100 active nodes for the first time. After launching in 2018, the expansion of the Lightning Network for the Litecoin token has been rather slow.

Richards notes that this slow expansion is in part due to the “lack of any real urgency to adopt the technology.” However, despite this comment, the Litecoin LN has managed to expand. Richards stated: “Litecoin’s Layer 1 blockchain remains free from congestion thanks to its 4x quicker block time, allowing it to process 4x as many transactions as its big brother Bitcoin over the same time period.”

Whilst Litecoin processes transactions faster than Bitcoin, the leading token has substantially more active nodes than Litecoin does. The number of active Bitcoin LN nodes is thought to be around 5,100. This in turn provides Bitcoin with a capacity of over 550.5 Bitcoin (equating to over $2 million). In stark contrast, Litecoin’s LN capacity is just 26.5 Litecoin, which is only worth around $950.

Richards speculates on the reason why Litecoin has fewer active nodes than Bitcoin, revealing, “The current onboarding process to the network is likewise not ideal and may also play a factor in uptake.” This is largely a result of users needing to download and compile the Lightning Network Daemon. (A Daemon in computing refers to a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user.)

Fans of Litecoin will certainly be happy to hear this news, but it remains to be seen how this will impact Litecoin going forwards.

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