847,000 active Lightning addresses follow Strike’s African expansion

M-Pesa integration in Kenya

Tando announced 40 million Kenyan M-Pesa users have Bitcoin Lightning addresses through the phonenumber@bitcoin.co.ke format. This rollout follows the Strike remittance corridor expansion that doubled its node count in September 2026. These 847,000 active Lightning addresses signify a shift in how African users interact with Bitcoin. Users receive Bitcoin at these addresses without downloading any new applications. When Bitcoin arrives at an unclaimed number, Tando converts it to Kenyan shillings with a 1% fee and sends it to the M-Pesa account. Users can send between 15 and 10,000 KES per transaction. You should understand that the verification process improves the experience. The verification process requires a KES 210 payment via M-Pesa to confirm the Safaricom phone number. This payment links the number to a Lightning wallet such as Phoenix, Machankura, or Cake Wallet. Once claimed, the address receives Bitcoin directly with no conversion fees and no middleman involvement. Tando’s model mimics the 2007 M-Pesa rollout in Kenya, where users skipped traditional banks for mobile money. Recipients receive a payment notification exactly like an M-Pesa transfer. Diaspora users can send value to family members without waiting for them to adopt Bitcoin. The 1% fee for converting unclaimed Bitcoin to Kenyan shillings is lower than the 5% to 10% fees charged by Western Union. Users can also use their phone number for receiving multiple payments over time without needing a new invoice.

Metric	Value
Unclaimed conversion fee	1%
Claiming verification fee	KES 210
Max transaction limit	10,000 KES

Security and capacity trends

Core Lightning developers issued a 14-day lockdown on August 23, 2026, after AI-generated bug reports arrived on August 13. The team spent ten days triaging the bugs before the public warning. The incident puts 3,750 BTC and 33,000 channels at risk. The affected network carries roughly 2,640 BTC across 20,000 channels, which is $168 million at current prices. Public Lightning capacity fell from a December 2025 peak of 5,637 BTC to roughly 2,640 BTC in August 2026. Node counts also declined from a 2022 high of 20,700 to 17,438 in May 2026. The Core Lightning team prioritizes the distribution of signed, reproducible builds to ensure that node operators can cryptographically verify their software matches the published source code before they deploy the new patch to their local infrastructure. Because the AI-assisted bug hunting tools move at a speed that traditional disclosure windows cannot control, the decision to use a 14-day embargo remains a gamble for the security of the entire network. Will the speed of AI-assisted bug discovery eventually outpace the ability of developers to patch these vulnerabilities? The advisory ended support for older releases, including version 26.04, which the team treats as insecure. Core Lightning, LND, and Eclair follow the same underlying Lightning specification, but they maintain different release cadences and security response processes. A vulnerability in one client does not apply to the others because implementation-specific bugs live in implementation-specific code.

Protocol updates and implementation

BOLT12 provides reusable, static payment identifiers that replace BOLT11 invoices. Core Lightning and Eclair support BOLT12, but LND still requires the LNDK sidecar daemon for these features. The splicing feature allows nodes to resize channels without the downtime of closing and reopening them. Taproot Assets enables the transfer of USDT and USDC over Lightning rails. Transaction volume reached $1.17 billion in November 2025, which is 266% growth compared to the previous year. Lightning users also see benefits from Phoenix Wallet’s Taproot channel support, which reduces on-chain fees by 20%. LND v0.20 migrated the channel graph to SQL, reducing query execution time by 95 to 99%. CoinGate reported that Lightning accounted for over 16% of all Bitcoin orders on its platform in 2024. The decline in capacity reflects a shift toward larger, fewer channels and increased use of private channels that do not appear on public trackers. Capacity for the public graph sat at 4,870.8 BTC in May 2026, which is a 17% decrease from the December 2025 peak.