For years, Bitcoiners pushed exchanges to adopt Lightning.

And guess what? It worked. Public Lightning volume is up 266% in about a year.

A few interesting insights from our new @River report:

Our previous Lightning research in 2023 showed a 1212% increase in transactions.

Many of these were low value, as people experimented with new apps & business models.

Now, a new wave of bigger volume has come in, driven by exchanges.

We used the same methodology for our estimates as in 2023, but instead of having data on 52% of public capacity, we now got up to 79.4%

A massive thank you to Acinq, @Alby, Bitfinex, @Breez ⚡️, C=, @LNBϟG, Kraken, LQWD, NiceHash, OKX, Cyberdyne, Sunny Sarah, @THNDR, and @Wallet of Satoshi for sharing data.

The Lightning industry continues to grow

We’ve updated our map, adding 46 new companies and removing 12.

We expect Lightning to continue growing:
- On-chain fees remain low, slowing adoption.
- USDT on Lightning may increase activity.
- Dozens of scaling proposals continue to build on Lightning.

More Lightning + Bitcoin adoption trends in our new report 👇
https://blog.river.com/bitcoin-adoption-2025/