Live capacity, channels and nodes — Bitcoin's instant-payment layer in numbers.
Lightning is Bitcoin's payment layer: a mesh of two-party channels that lets bitcoin move instantly for fractions of a cent, settling to the main chain only when channels open or close. The statistics above come live from mempool.space's Lightning explorer and cover the network's public footprint.
Capacity is public liquidity; channels and nodes describe the mesh's density. Average channel size trends upward as the network professionalizes, while the median fee rate — quoted in parts-per-million of the routed amount — stays extraordinarily low compared to any traditional payment rail.
Private (unannounced) channels don't broadcast their existence and are invisible to explorers. Research estimates suggest a substantial fraction of real payment traffic flows through them, so treat these figures as the visible floor, not the ceiling.
Base-layer Bitcoin optimizes for security and final settlement, not throughput. Lightning inherits Bitcoin's security while enabling coffee-sized payments — the division of labor that lets sats function as everyday money. Our sat converter page pairs naturally with this one.
← See the full BTCDash dashboard — price, hashrate, halving, fees & 70+ live metrics