Lightning Capacity
Bitcoin committed to public Lightning channels, in BTC
Saved observation
3,450.20853865 BTC
- Measured at
- Retrieved at
- Source
- mempool.emzy.de · Dataset used
Recent observation. The measurement is less than 72 hours old when this page was generated on .
This observation and the chart use the same history from mempool.emzy.de, an independent instance of the mempool software. They cover the public graph observed by Emzy, not all channels, users or payment volume.
History available from .
The history is replaced in full when the site updates, without adding points from a different observer. Each point’s date is shown in its tooltip. The saved observation remains readable if the chart does not load.
- Source
- mempool.emzy.de
What this measures
Lightning capacity is the total amount of bitcoin locked in the Lightning Network’s public channels, expressed in BTC, according to mempool.emzy.de. A channel’s capacity is the amount of the Bitcoin output that funds it: it includes the funds on both sides, without revealing how they are split. Because it is denominated in bitcoin, the metric is immune to price swings: a rise means more BTC actually committed.
Capacity is not volume
This is the most common mix-up. Capacity measures a stock: the funds tied up to make payments possible. It says nothing about the flow, meaning the amount of payments that cross the network. The same satoshis can move back and forth across a channel thousands of times without capacity changing at all.
That volume cannot be observed publicly, and that is by design. Lightning payments are not recorded on-chain, and onion routing prevents each intermediary from knowing the full route. The volume figures that circulate come from estimates or from data published by individual companies, never from a measurement of the whole network.
As with nodes and channels, only the public part is counted. The unannounced channels of many non-custodial mobile wallets are left out, and so are the balances held by custodial services: one operator can serve a large user base with modest public capacity.
More BTC committed does not mean more usage
Capacity is often held up as proof of adoption. That is a shortcut. A rise can come from a few large platforms opening big channels, which became possible once the old limit of about 0.17 BTC per channel was lifted, a change known as “wumbo.” Conversely, a decline does not necessarily mean less usage: consolidated channels, funds pulled out through splicing without closing a channel, or liquidity moving elsewhere can produce the same curve. The number of channels and average channel size help tell these scenarios apart.
Capacity does not guarantee that payments go through, either. A network can show plenty of capacity and still be hard to use if that liquidity sits in the wrong places: a payment fails as soon as one channel along the route lacks funds on the right side.
Part of the usage also runs through layers built alongside Lightning, which connect to it to pay without locking their funds in public channels.
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Which leaves the question of distribution: if a large share of the committed BTC belongs to a few players, the network gains liquidity at the cost of independence. A single total cannot show that.