Arcane Research: Lightning Network users will exceed 700 million by 2030
By 2030, the number of active users of Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) micropayments may exceed 700 million, analysts at Arcane Research concluded.
The analysts noted that the usual metrics like channel capacity do not reflect the true scale of the network's growth.
In September, El Salvador legalized bitcoin, P2P-platform Paxful integrated LN, and Twitter allowed content creators to accept donations in digital gold. Since then, payment volume on the Lightning Network has nearly doubled, though channel bandwidth has only increased by 26%, experts pointed out.
The number of LN users increased 11,164% to 9.7 million in September, up from 87,000 in August. Arcane Research thinks El Salvador's example could be followed by other countries with underdeveloped banking systems or dollarized economies. If so, the growth would be exponential.
The combined population of these countries is 850 million people, with 650 million of them currently without access to the banking system. In a scenario in which states representing 10% of that population adopt bitcoin by 2030, we would have another 50 million LN users by the end of the decade, the report says.
Arcane Research believes that number could be even higher, as LN has the potential to revolutionize the content industry. If consumers pay for content using a micropayment network, the number of users could grow to 700 million by 2030.
There are significant overlaps between users of services related to the consumption of different content . We decided to be conservative and choose the largest number, 1.1 billion gamers. [...] 25% of the services they use require streaming. [...] So the number of Lightning Network users would be 25% to 100% of the 1.1 billion. We took a simple approach and chose an average of about 700 million users by 2030, the report says.
Recall that Glassnode analysts also calculated that Twitter and El Salvador accelerated the development of the Lightning Network.