Many are asking how Greenlight numbers can be so high and why they're not reflected in public Lightning datasets like 1ML.
To help put things in perspective, let's break down the numbers and what this implies for the 'Lightning is dead' narrative that certain influencers have been peddling:
The first thing to know is that Greenlight nodes are unannounced/private and on-demand, so they aren't included in public estimates. This isn’t unique to Greenlight--many other Lightning infrastructure providers (think Lightspark) don’t broadcast for privacy and other reasons.
Each Greenlight node roughly corresponds to one user, meaning the 150k nodes represent about 150k users (unless large swaths of users are gaming the numbers by using different seeds with the same or multiple devices). When a Greenlight node isn't in use, it becomes dormant and then reactivates later as well, so no new nodes are created or destroyed in this process that could obfuscate the numbers.
More context: most of these new nodes are from Relai's recent integration of the Breez SDK, which runs Greenlight under the hood. A growing number of small Lightning startups, like Blitz, also use Greenlight on the backend, but those numbers often go unreported.
So, the narrative of Lightning's impending doom is likely vastly overstated, especially when infrastructure projects like Greenlight and their impact are almost always overlooked when discussing the growth of the network.
In my opinion, it's far more believable that Lightning is in a transitional phase due to new developments in bitcoin payment technology and infrastructure (Greenlight, Lightspark, Breez SDK, Ark, etc) and is just now coming into its own.
Greenlight's numbers are proof of this.
View quoted note →
