$1B monthly volume on lightning with Sam Wouters | SLP725

**Sam Wouters** (0:00)
By no means saying scalability is solved. It's more like, it's not as big of a challenge as we initially thought it would be, because we don't need 8 billion people on there. Should we just give up on everything that doesn't scale immediately to the entire planet? It's like, no, that doesn't really make sense.

**Stephan Livera** (0:15)
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, I'm joined by Sam Wouters from River. Many of you will know River as a Bitcoin-only brokerage, financial services, various products that they're offering, known for doing Lightning stuff as well. And I know you guys are just going to be putting out this report soon on Bitcoin adoption. And interestingly for me, especially, it's the Lightning adoption stuff. So, you know, welcome to the show, Sam. And yeah, just give us a bit of an overview and what you saw in this report.

**Sam Wouters** (0:46)
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Stephan. So with the report, like, this is something we've been doing for the last couple of years. And one of the goals has been to make something that is very hard to understand and kind of map out more understandable for people. So everyone is familiar, typically, or I'm saying everyone, but a lot of people probably aren't familiar with sort of like how much capacity is in the Lightning Network, how many channels there are, sort of like how long it's been around, which has been almost 10 years now since it was first conceived. And what people struggle with is really understanding how much is it actually being used? Are people using Lightning on a day to day basis? What are they using it for? How often, how big are those transactions? Beyond individuals running their own Lightning nodes, there just isn't that much clarity on the developments there. And that makes it really hard for people to understand like is sort of like, is Bitcoin scaling? Like does this technology work? Who is adopting it? Like what is it being used for? And it makes things like capital allocation in the space really difficult because investors just don't know, like if I'm investing in a Lightning company, is there actual demand in the market there other than like the public metrics that I can tell that typically don't move drastically over time? So it's quite difficult for them to make informed decisions without more information. And then for people choosing to dedicate their career to improving Lightning as well, it's like, who am I doing it for? I can't really see who is using it or like how active that is other than my own note that I'm running and the activity that's happening there. So the data just like helps to inform a whole variety of different stakeholders, also even like exchanges. Should we adopt Lightning? Should we offer that to our clients or not? If they don't know how many people really need it and their clients aren't at large scale reaching out to them asking them to add it, then they don't really know. So lots of different categories there that get better informed through better data. And then we kind of made the decision a couple of years back, like at River, we have our own Lightning data. Obviously, there's other people in the space that also have Lightning data.
What if we just do an exercise once a year where we try to collect as much as possible and then get a bit of an indication that way of like how much traffic could roughly be happening on the network? So all of this is obviously, you know, it's by no means perfect. And a big reason for that as well is because we're only using public data. And the Lightning network can also be used privately in the sense of private channels where the participants just aren't publicly known and we don't have any data on that either. So this is, in that regard, it's like a lower bound estimate as well. And the reality could still be significantly higher.

**Stephan Livera** (3:24)
Right. So, yeah, let's talk about the high level numbers because I think that will be interesting for people. So give us the headline stats on Lightning Network nowadays.

**Sam Wouters** (3:36)
Yeah. So what we found was we did this exercise for November 2025 It takes like a while to gather all the data and process everything.
And in that month, we found like we basically collected data on about 50% of all the capacity on the network. So that's quite a lot. With that said, the year before we did about 80% and the year before that was also around 50%. So it's kind of fluctuated based on like who's willing to participate, how much are we able to gather, where is all the capacity located and whatnot. But we used that roughly 50% to then determine like, you kind of want to avoid how much overlap is there between these two. We used these nodes and to then arrive at like roughly how much volume has flown through and how many transactions have flowed through that 50% of the capacity. And then extrapolate that to the rest of the network to get like a rough estimate of sort of like directionally, order of magnitude, how much is going on. So what we found there was that in November 2025, we went over a billion dollars in transaction volume on Lightning. I think the final number was 1.17 billion that we found compared to the year before 2024, we found 286 That's indeed in the month of November. And then a year earlier in November 2024, it was about $286 million. So that's a really significant increase. Like it's a Forex increase basically, which was very like pretty shocking to find. That's a very rapid increase. And people are especially surprised, I think, because the Bitcoin price has been relatively like sideways and now down in recent months. But back in November, it was like an average for a year. So the questions start flowing in from people like, hey, is this a strange outlier of some kind? Like, did you guys check more data throughout the year? Like, did someone cook the books or whatever? And we have our own data, obviously, at River, but we also had partial data from some other data providers for December.