Over the past four months, around $140 billion of cryptocurrency market value has evaporated, but despite this misery, Bitcoin's Lightning Network (BTC) has shown an increase of 200% in network capacity at the same time. In the past few weeks, the network even doubled its capacity.
The Lightning Network was brought to life a year and a half ago to solve the problems with the scalability of Bitcoin. With a capacity of only 7 transactions per second, it is very limited if you consider the fact that Visa can handle, for example, 4,000 transactions per second. The Lightning Network is an off-chain layer on top of Bitcoin's main network, where users access a payment channel and, as long as the balance on the payment channel is sufficient, can make unlimited transactions back and forth without using the blockchain from Bitcoin. Only for the opening and closing of such a payment channel is the blockchain used and thus the network capacity increases considerably.
The Lightning Network is primarily intended for small transactions but with an increase of 200% the total value of transactions has reached about $1.9 million. With a network capacity of 421 BTC, it has grown exponentially over the past month. According to 1ML data, the network counts 4,111 nodes while the number of payment channels runs up to 12,000. However, due to the decentralized nature of the Lightning Network, these statistics are approximations.