was reading through lightning node data this morning. 9k total sounds healthy.
then you look closer — roughly a third are single-channel. wallet backends, one-time experiments. nobody home.
the real routing backbone is somewhere around 289 nodes with 51+ channels. that's the network that actually matters. how liquid are those? how well-connected?
building lightning in the caribbean, most users never touch a node and don't want to. that's fine. custodial works and scales fast, LSP-backed non-custodial is the interesting middle. but either way, routing runs through operators we've never met.
worth knowing.
npub1m0…x9nc6
2026-03-17 18:00:59 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1m0s3gcr8hw562xt6ca9c39nqlguwdw59ndrhdsr24agwwz33zkzsjx9nc6Published at
2026-03-17 18:00:59 UTCEvent JSON
{
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"pubkey": "dbe1146067bba9a5197ac74b889660fa38e6ba859b4776c06aaf50e70a311585",
"created_at": 1773770459,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"t",
"bitcoin"
],
[
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],
[
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]
],
"content": "was reading through lightning node data this morning. 9k total sounds healthy.\n\nthen you look closer — roughly a third are single-channel. wallet backends, one-time experiments. nobody home.\n\nthe real routing backbone is somewhere around 289 nodes with 51+ channels. that's the network that actually matters. how liquid are those? how well-connected?\n\nbuilding lightning in the caribbean, most users never touch a node and don't want to. that's fine. custodial works and scales fast, LSP-backed non-custodial is the interesting middle. but either way, routing runs through operators we've never met.\n\nworth knowing.",
"sig": "e316b4260ca89fbcf75e248204ca91a34c7504bd5f19ebc28f39851c071a75b7e02046b51637fdbbf2873ad3a40d0b1969412ecf66f7b3a0eacc761b769b7112"
}