Lightning’s Billion-Dollar Month and Who Uses It

Summary

The February 23, 2026 episode of the Stephan Livera Podcast features Sam Wouters outlining new evidence that Lightning Network monthly volume exceeded $1.17 billion in November 2025 despite modest public capacity metrics. Wouters explains how extrapolated node data, rising channel efficiency, and exchange-centered flows show that Lightning is quietly scaling real usage even as headline Bitcoin prices drift sideways. He then connects these findings to broader trends in institutional accumulation, business treasury adoption, and the social challenge of advocating for Bitcoin without reinforcing its reputation as a speculative gamble.

Take-Home Messages

1. Lightning volume is materially higher than public metrics suggest: Extrapolated data indicate more than $1.17 billion in Lightning payments in November 2025, far above what channel capacity alone would imply.
2. Network efficiency now matters more than capacity totals: Operators are routing multiple channel turnovers per month, showing that liquidity management and channel design drive throughput.
3. Exchange-centered flows dominate early Lightning use: Many users still treat exchanges as their main wallets, so withdrawals, deposits, and cross-exchange transfers account for a large share of Lightning traffic.
4. Ownership is gradually shifting toward institutions and businesses: On-chain data suggest roughly 700,000 BTC moved from individuals to institutional vehicles in 2025, while thousands of firms now hold Bitcoin in their treasuries.
5. Public perception, not scalability, is the binding constraint: Misclassification of Bitcoin alongside scams and speculative tokens remains a larger barrier to adoption than current technical limits on transaction throughput.

Overview

Sam Wouters centers the conversation on a new Lightning Network study that uses data from roughly half of public channel capacity to estimate total activity. By tallying observed payments and extrapolating to the unseen half, he concludes that Lightning handled around $1.17 billion in volume and approximately 5.2 million transactions in November 2025. He stresses that these figures are lower-bound estimates because private channels and non-participating nodes remain invisible to the analysis.

He contrasts this throughput with public capacity metrics that show only about 5,348 BTC locked in Lightning channels at a given time. Livera notes that this implies roughly 17,000 BTC of monthly volume, or around three turns of capacity, challenging the assumption that "TVL" must rise for Lightning to be successful. Wouters argues that improving liquidity management, better loop mechanisms, and operator experience now allow more payments with less capital exposed in hot wallets.

When asked about user counts, Wouters concedes that serious attempts to infer the number of Lightning users from wallet downloads or exchange data have produced estimates too weak to publish. He points instead to transaction counts as the best available proxy, while emphasizing that these cannot distinguish a handful of heavy users from a broad base of occasional payers. He also notes that average Lightning payment sizes appear to be rising, consistent with common use cases like exchange withdrawals and cross-exchange transfers.

Wouters reflects on early Lightning narratives that assumed widespread self-custodial use and universal node-running behavior. In reality, many users rely on custodial or semi-custodial services, and much of today’s Lightning volume clusters around large intermediaries, creating a hub-and-spoke topology. He maintains that this concentration is a natural early-stage pattern that may gradually decentralize as more merchants, wallets, and payment applications come online.

Implications and Future Outlook

Wouters argues that Bitcoin’s most pressing challenge is no longer scalability but public perception, as many people still mentally file it alongside scams and other tokens. He notes that on-chain fees remain relatively low and Lightning already handles substantial volume without requiring every user to maintain channels, suggesting technical headroom for further growth. In his view, future bottlenecks will arise more from social narratives and regulatory framing than from immediate throughput limits.

The discussion then broadens to ownership trends and business adoption, highlighting that individuals sold or moved an estimated 700,000 BTC to institutional vehicles in 2025, a shift of about 3 percentage points of supply. Wouters describes thousands of businesses across sectors quietly allocating 1–10% of their treasuries to Bitcoin or earning it as interest on cash, often with long-term holding intentions. He frames disciplined dollar-cost averaging by individuals and opportunistic accumulation by firms as the quiet counterpart to louder speculative manias on gambling-focused platforms.

Some Key Information Gaps

1. How robust are Lightning volume estimates that extrapolate from only about 50% of public channel capacity? Policymakers and investors need to understand whether current sampling approaches truly capture network-scale activity or could be skewed by unobserved nodes and private channels.
2. What empirical methods could produce defensible lower- and upper-bound estimates of active Lightning users? Clearer user metrics are essential for judging Lightning’s contribution to financial inclusion, competition with card networks, and the need for consumer safeguards.
3. What share of Lightning traffic originates from exchange withdrawals, arbitrage, and internal flows versus retail payments and remittances? Distinguishing these categories would clarify whether Lightning is evolving primarily as a wholesale settlement layer for intermediaries or as a broad consumer payments network.
4. How will continued shifts of hundreds of thousands of BTC from individuals to institutional vehicles influence long-run price dynamics? Understanding this transition is key to anticipating who captures future upside, how concentrated market power may become, and how resilient ownership patterns will be under stress.
5. How do gambling-style platforms and meme-coin speculation alter retail investors’ willingness to engage in long-term Bitcoin saving? This question bears directly on household financial health, regulatory priorities, and the design of products that steer users toward disciplined accumulation rather than short-term betting.

Broader Implications for Bitcoin

Measuring Lightning Without Undermining Privacy

The reliance on partial node data and extrapolation underscores a broader challenge of measuring Lightning usage while preserving its privacy benefits. Researchers and operators will likely experiment with new telemetry, sampling, and survey methods that improve visibility without centralizing data collection. Better measurement could support sound policy and capital allocation while reinforcing, rather than weakening, the network’s non-custodial potential.

Exchange-Centered Flows and Systemic Risk

The prominence of exchange withdrawals and cross-platform transfers in Lightning traffic suggests that early adoption is heavily intermediated. If this pattern persists, liquidity shocks, outages, or regulatory actions affecting a handful of large hubs could ripple through Lightning-connected services worldwide. Encouraging more diverse routing, non-custodial wallets, and merchant-driven flows would reduce single-point-of-failure risks while maintaining convenience for mainstream users.

Institutional Accumulation and Retail Opportunity

The gradual transfer of coins from long-time individual holders to institutional products and business treasuries points toward a future in which large entities own a growing share of Bitcoin’s fixed supply. Over a 3–5+ year horizon, this could stabilize some flows while also concentrating influence over lending markets, derivatives, and governance-adjacent debates. For households, the window to accumulate meaningful exposure before supply tightens further may be shorter than sentiment in flat-price periods suggests.

Business Treasuries as Bitcoin Transmission Channels

Small and mid-sized enterprises using Bitcoin to offset inflation effectively act as transmission channels between financial markets and everyday economic activity. As more firms allocate even a few percent of their treasuries, employees and customers become indirectly exposed to Bitcoin’s fortunes and may push for direct participation. This dynamic could, over time, drive organic, bottom-up integration of Bitcoin into payroll, invoicing, and vendor relationships in multiple jurisdictions.

Speculative Platforms and Financial Health

The rise of gambling-style products and meme-token speculation on major trading platforms risks crowding out slower, steadier Bitcoin accumulation among retail users. In the next several years, this divergence may widen gaps in financial outcomes between those who treat Bitcoin as a long-term savings asset and those who chase short-lived manias. Regulators and product designers will need to balance innovation with safeguards that discourage exploitative designs while preserving genuine user choice.