Bitcoin Lightning Network growth jumps 1,200% in 2 years
A report from the Bitcoin-only exchange River suggests increased Lightning usage will play a key role in Bitcoin becoming a better medium of exchange.
Bitcoin’s layer 2 Lightning Network has seen an estimated 1,212% growth in two years, with around 6.6 million routed transactions in August, a significant jump compared with August 2021’s 503,000 transactions, according to data from the Bitcoin-only exchange River.
In an Oct. 10 report, River research analyst Sam Wouters explained the jump in routed transactions — which use more than two nodes to facilitate a transfer — came despite a 44% fall in Bitcoin’s price and considerably less online search interest.
River’s 6.6 million figure for Lightning-routed transactions is a lower-bound estimate — the smallest possible value it could assess. The firm also sourced August 2021’s 503,000 figure from a 2021 study by K33, formerly Arcane Research, and added it could not assess private Lightning transactions or those between only two participants.
New Research Paper “BitVM” Could Bring Ethereum Programs to Bitcoin
Robert Linus — project lead at Bitcoin development group ZeroSync — has proposed a new system allowing developers to “compute anything on Bitcoin,” giving it functionality more similar to its neighboring crypto network Ethereum.
Unlike other proposals to expand Bitcoin’s capabilities, “BitVM” does not require any changes to Bitcoin’s code that could cause the network and community to contentiously rift apart.
According to the project’s whitepaper published on Monday, BitVM is a “computing paradigm to express Turing complete Bitcoin contracts.”
Rather than executing complex computations on the blockchain itself, the system suggests that they merely be “verified” on Bitcoin, with computation done off-chain. Linus likened the system to optimistic rollups — an Ethereum scaling solution that processes many transactions off-chain before posting them in batches to the main chain.
Source: Cryptopotato
Hut 8 boosts self-mined Bitcoin reserves to 9.4K amid USBTC merger
The Canadian Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 continues to accumulate self-mined BTC amid the ongoing merger deal with the industrial cryptocurrency miner, US Bitcoin (USBTC).
Hut 8 mined 111 Bitcoin in September 2023, bringing its self-mined BTC reserves to 9,366 Bitcoin, the firm announced on Oct. 10.
The amount of Bitcoin mined by Hut 8 in September is up around 8% from the previous month but is still significantly lower than in May 2023 when Hut mined 147 BTC. The Bitcoin miner has seen its mining pace drop significantly over the past year, as its monthly mining volumes dropped nearly 60% from 277 BTC mined in September 2022.
Source: Cointelegraph
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