The people shaping Bitcoin’s Lightning Network

Elizabeth Stark leads Lightning Labs expansion

Elizabeth Stark leads Lightning Labs in developing the Lightning Network. She co-founded the company in 2016 to fix Bitcoin scalability problems. Her academic work at Stanford and Yale focused on privacy and peer-to-peer technology. Blockstream researchers Tim Ruffing and Elliott Jin proposed ROAST, which stands for Robust Asynchronous Schnorr Threshold Signatures. This protocol wraps the FROST Schnorr scheme to scale threshold signatures in layer-2 protocols like Liquid that use a federated consensus model. ROAST guarantees reliable peg-outs and optimizes block signing among the functionaries. The research team measured performance using a 67-of-100 setup, but the protocol works with any number of parties or multisig sizes even if the group size grows much larger than that measurement.

Jack Mallers expands Strike into Africa

Jack Mallers expanded Strike into Africa through a partnership with Bitnob. This service, called "Send Globally," provides instant, low-cost payments in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and other emerging markets. The service in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya provides instant, low-cost payments by utilizing the Lightning Network, which is the layer-2 payments network built on top of Bitcoin to improve transaction speed for all users. Bitnob converts US dollar payments into naira, cedi, or shillings. These funds go directly to mobile money, Bitnob accounts, or recipient banks. This system avoids the high costs of traditional services. For example, Western Union charges more than 10% for money transfers. Remittance remains a major source of foreign exchange in Nigeria, where the economy received $17.2 billion in remittances in 2020. Nigerians will benefit from eliminating the fees that typically claim 8.9% of such funds.

ACINQ manages Phoenix liquidity and splicing

ACINQ manages the Phoenix wallet and its liquidity needs. The company charges a 1% liquidity fee on new inbound capacity, with a minimum of 3,000 sats. It also applies a 0.4% plus 4 sat fee on forwarded payments. This differs from Breez, which charges 0.1 to 0.25% on received payments. In April 2026, Core Lightning released version 26.04, which made splicing production-ready. Splicing allows operators to resize channels without the need to close and reopen them. This helps solve the issue of liquidity shifting to one side of a channel. Many independent operators struggle with this because rebalancing can cost much more than they earn in fees. One operator documented spending 542 ppm on rebalancing while earning only 140 ppm in routing fees. The pricing is complex, and you already know that managing liquidity is the hardest part of the job.

Network capacity and the economics of routing

The Lightning Network reached a total active capacity of 3,736 BTC in September 2026. During that month, the network saw 5,306 channels open and 6,971 channels close. The capacity is divided into different tiers. "Freeway" channels with more than 1 BTC hold 42.2% of the capacity. "Highway" channels holding between 5 million and 100 million sats hold 48.0% of the capacity. The "My Way" tier, consisting of channels with less than 5 million sats, contains 73.2% of the edges. As of mid-2026, the network held 4,871 BTC in public capacity across 41,000 active channels and 17,400 nodes.

A node with 50,000 USD in capacity, or about 0.5 BTC at 100,000 USD per BTC, typically manages 15 to 20 channels. These channels might have an average size of 2.5 million sats. Such a node generates between $15 and $40 in monthly routing revenue. However, the operator faces $5 to $15 in rebalancing costs and $3 to $10 in management fees. After hardware and electricity, the net monthly return ranges from negative $5 to a positive $15. This results in an annualized return between -1.2% and 3.6% before accounting for the 4.3% yield from US Treasuries. A larger 500,000 USD node, or 5 BTC, sees different results. This node manages 40 to 60 channels and generates $200 to $600 in monthly revenue. After $50 to $150 in rebalancing and $20 to $50 in management, the net monthly profit sits between $50 and $400.

Lightning Labs released the sixth release candidate for LND in preparation for v0.15.0. This version adds Taproot PSBT signing support and MuSig2 experimentation. Users also see updates to lncli. In another update, Core Lightning released v0.11.1 to fix bugs. This version introduced channel multiplexing, a new gRPC API plugin, and the newest version of onion messaging. Professional operators like LQWD Technologies achieve between 6% and 9% APR with optimized deployments. A mid-size node with 10 BTC in capacity earns roughly 30,000 sats daily, which is about $300 per month at mid-2026 prices. This income must cover server hosting and the 5,000 sats cost to open a channel.

The most widely cited profitability data point comes from Block. At Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas, Block’s Bitcoin Product Lead Miles Suter announced that their routing node earned a 9.7% APR on approximately 184 BTC of deployed liquidity. This amounted to roughly $1 million per year in routing revenue. However, researcher Riccardo Masutti characterized the 9.7% yield as a surcharge imposed on intermediated payments rather than any real efficiency in liquidity allocation. Smaller operators face different realities. A node with 1 to 2 BTC in capacity earns between $5 and $60 per month. Hardware costs for a Raspberry Pi 5 with a 1TB NVMe SSD range from $240 to $320. Will independent nodes eventually disappear as routing concentration increases?