Lightning Network Monthly Transactions Cross $1 Billion Threshold: New Data
Bitcoin financial firm River's latest analysis predicts growing transaction activity driven by emerging AI-powered payment experimentation among users and enterprises.
The Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network, a second-layer protocol designed to facilitate payment applications for BTC, achieved monthly transaction volumes exceeding $1 billion for the first time in November 2025, based on analysis released by River, a Bitcoin financial services provider.
According to data presented in a report distributed by Sam Wouters, who serves as River's marketing director, the Lightning Network processed approximately $1.1 billion worth of transactions throughout November, spanning 5.2 million individual transactions. The analysis noted:
"Lightning adoption happened despite the price declining all of November and generally not doing much in 2025. The adoption was largely driven by exchanges, as well as a growing number of businesses accepting bitcoin payments."
Despite this milestone, the overall number of transactions processed throughout 2025 remains below levels seen in 2023, when Lightning Network activity reached a peak of 6.6 million monthly transactions during August of that year, a phenomenon River linked to widespread testing of micropayment functionality in gaming platforms and messaging applications.
River's analysis anticipates a comparable increase in Lightning Network transaction activity as both individual users and commercial enterprises explore applications involving AI-driven payments.
The Lightning Network serves as a scaling solution for the Bitcoin blockchain, facilitating Bitcoin-based payments between participants that finalize within seconds rather than minutes, thereby promoting Bitcoin's utility as a transactional currency, rather than solely functioning as a speculative investment or wealth preservation tool.
Lightning Network gains traction among exchanges and institutional users
By establishing payment channels between two or more participants to process transactions off the main blockchain, the Lightning Network decreases both transaction fees and settlement duration, recording only the final net balance to the Bitcoin ledger when the channel closes.
Under normal circumstances, Bitcoin blocks require an average of 10 minutes to be validated and added to the distributed ledger, creating significant constraints for BTC payment use cases, especially for smaller-value transactions at brick-and-mortar retail locations.
During December 2025, the Lightning Network's total capacity, representing the aggregate amount of coins committed to the network to provide liquidity, climbed to 5,606 BTC, reflecting increased adoption among corporations and institutional participants.
Secure Digital Markets, a firm specializing in institutional cryptocurrency trading and lending services, successfully transmitted $1 million to cryptocurrency exchange Kraken via a Lightning transaction during February.
This high-value transfer demonstrated the capability of Bitcoin's second-layer scaling infrastructure to handle substantial, seven-figure payment amounts between institutional counterparties.