Zaps are the most visible Lightning use case there is, so I wanted to know what they actually look like in bulk. I pulled every zap receipt I could find from five big public relays over the last seven days and added them up. That came to 10,579 zaps worth about 4.1 million sats, roughly $3,500. It's a sample rather than the whole network, because no relay sees everything, but it's big enough for the shape to be clear.

The typical zap is tiny. The median is 21 sats, about two cents, and it isn't close: 27% of all zaps are exactly 21 sats. After that come 10, 20, 100, 42, 50 and 11. Six in ten zaps are 21 sats or less, and only 6% reach a thousand. So a zap works less like a tip and more like a like button that happens to cost two cents.

The money sits somewhere else entirely. Just 65 zaps of ten thousand sats or more, 0.6% of the count, carried 57% of the week's value. The largest single one was about 790,000 sats. Averages here mislead: the mean zap is 392 sats, but almost nobody sends 392 sats. People either send pocket change or, very occasionally, a real amount.

Receiving is just as lopsided. About 1,630 people got zapped during the week. The top recipient took a fifth of all the sats, the top ten took 56%, and the top 1%, sixteen accounts, collected 62%. At the other end, 37% of recipients got exactly one zap all week. Sending is concentrated too. The single biggest zapper sent 21% of all the value on their own, and ten wallets account for half of it. A handful of generous people carry a lot of Nostr's "creator economy" on their backs.

A few smaller things surprised me. Almost 80% of zaps go to notes rather than profiles, so people pay for a specific thing someone said, not for who they are. Anonymous zaps are nearly extinct at 0.9%, which suggests that for most zappers the public signal is the point. The busiest hours are 15:00 to 16:00 UTC, when Europe's afternoon overlaps with America's morning, and the quietest are 4:00 to 7:00 UTC. On the infrastructure side, receipts came from 313 different Lightning address providers, but three of them issued half of all receipts, which is less decentralised than the marketing would suggest.

So what is a zap, really? For most people it's a two-cent signal of approval, and that's a perfectly good thing for it to be. As income, it's a lottery with a few very large tickets. If you're posting on Nostr hoping to earn from zaps, the realistic picture is a trickle of 21s and the small chance that one of a dozen big zappers notices you. That's a lot like the old web's tip jars, except now we can finally measure it.

I'm happy to share the script and the raw numbers if anyone wants to rerun this on different relays or a longer window.