 earlier this year. Here is an updated version with a new landing page and a full redesign of the interface for the whole website.

I have to say, it makes the experience much more enjoyable and the info easily digestible compared with the previous one. The dashboard link does not work anymore, but I see some activity in the repos, let's see if something new comes out soon.

In the meantime, I share the results from the research project published who has 

 on the gathered historical data. Sharing the images below as you never know what happen with GH repos.

Design

lightning

It was released in Aug 2025 and I wrote [about it](https://stacker.news/items/1439356) earlier this year. Here is an updated version with a new landing page and a full redesign of the interface for the whole website. 

![](https://m.stacker.news/157360)

I have to say, it makes the experience much more enjoyable and the info easily digestible compared with the previous one. The dashboard link does not work anymore, but I see some activity in the repos, let's see if something new comes out soon.

In the meantime, I share the results from the research project published who has [really interesting findings](https://ln-history.info/writings/historic-analysis-topology/) on the gathered historical data. Sharing the images below as you never know what happen with GH repos.

![The node count has grown rapidly during 2021 and 2022. In the following years many node operators have decided to shut down their nodes. In 2025 we can see that the node count stays above 10000.](https://m.stacker.news/157370)


![The number of locked bitcoin on the other hand has not seen a big drop as the node count. When comparing the locked bitcoin count with the equivalent value in USD the total capacity of the Lightning Network is at an all time high. Taking into consideration that prices are denominated in USD, the Lightning Network has never held more liquidity (denominated in USD).](https://m.stacker.news/157369)


![When trying to see how the Lightning evolved we can take a look at the diameter of the network. The diameter of a graph is the longest shortest path. We can examine that this value has remained constant at 9 nodes. This means that the longest possible payment would need to take 9 hops.](https://m.stacker.news/157368)


![Nodes set up a fee policy for each outward channel direction. This information gets propagated using the channel_update message. The fee policy of a channel consists of the fee_base_msat and the fee_proportional_millionths. We simulate 10000 payments of 100000 sats and calculate the median fee of the payments. The fee is stable below 7 sats.](https://m.stacker.news/157367)

![The graph shows that the share of channels with a fee_base_msat set to 0 is at slightly lower than 45 %. If we now check how many channels have set fee_proportional_millionths set to 0, we get a value of around 8.5 % of channels.](https://m.stacker.news/157366)

![Combining both settings we can can see the following.](https://m.stacker.news/157365)

![This graph looks almost identical to the previous graph, indicating that if nodes set the fee_proportional_millionthsto 0, the fee_base_msat is also set to 0. We can examine that the share of altruistic nodes is around 8.5 %.](https://m.stacker.news/157364)

![We can see that by just looking at the number of nodes, much more nodes run behind the Tor network. But this graph might be misleading as the next one shows.](https://m.stacker.news/157363)

![Most of the liquidity is managed by nodes using clearnet. The reason for that is that information speed is much higher in cleanet compared to Tor network.](https://m.stacker.news/157362)

![Lastly we want to examine which nodes dominate the Lightning Network. A dominant node is a node with many channels. We can see that enterprise nodes such as [ACINQ](https://acinq.co/), [1ML](https://1ml.com/), [WalletOfSatoshi](https://www.walletofsatoshi.com/) or [Kraken](https://www.kraken.com/) lead the list.](https://m.stacker.news/157361)