ambcrypto.com
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network gained massive popularity in 2019, with statistics backing up this assumption after the Lightning Network, recorded an impressive $5 million in capacity on the back of a recent price hike.
Anton Kumaigorodskiy, a Bitcoin Lightning Wallet Developer, spoke about the LN in a recent interview, claiming that important updates were underway. These updates will improve the overall efficiency of the Lightning Network, he added. He also opined that LN was “almost ready” for extensive adoption after operating on the mainnet for more than 12 months.
However, one of the important figures involved in the creation of the Lightning Network begged to differ.
Tadge Dryja, the co-author of the Lightning Network Whitepaper, recently appeared on “Whatbitcoindid” podcast and expressed his views on the Lightning Network.
Tadge said that the Lightning Network was definitely on the Mainnet in all true sense, but its functionality and operations were still very Testnet-like.
He highlighted the fact that people were not using it for real transactions and the Lightning Network was hardly involved in people buying goods via this medium.
He believed that the Lightning Network could gain significant importance if implementation or adoption took place between exchanges.
Tadge Dryja mentioned,
“It will be really cool and safer I feel if exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken are like we support lightning and you can open a channel with us and send payment to us very quickly.”
If exchanges allowed users to deposit and withdraw via a created channel and when the user were done trading, they could directly transfer their funds back to their side of the channel; the use of LN would be much more important in the cryptocurrency industry, he added.
At press time, Lightning Network capacity was recorded to be 1.057.98 BTC, which is approximately $5.5 million in valuation. It boasted around 8,197 nodes and 38,310 channels.