Twenty nineteen was an eventful year for the cryptocurrency market and especially Bitcoin. The world’s largest cryptocurrency witnessed multiple events on 0-chain and on the popular Lightning Network.
Rui Gomes, one of the developers on the Lightning Network recently pointed out that naysayers were completely wrong to say that the year was pointless for Bitcoin. He tweeted:
“On-chain: SegWit adoption from 40% to 58% Hash Rate from 44EH/s to 100EH/s 118M+ total transactions
Lightning Network: Public network capacity from 515 BTC to 850 BTC Public nodes from 4,800 to 10,900 Public channels from 16,000 to 35,000″
Bitcoin had also reached a point where it almost closed the $13,000 mark, trading for $12,887 on July 10. Bitcoin’s SegWit adoption had risen to a whopping 65.2 percent and the last settle was 55.59 percent. The developments did not pave the wave for a significant increase in price though, with Bitcoin currently trading for $7270. The world’s largest cryptocurrency held a market cap of $131.832 billion and a 24-hour market volume of $22.574 billion.
Bitcoin’s hash rate had also peaked this year and was currently holding at 106.850 trillion hashes per second. The highest hash rate reached this year was 109.280 trillion hashes during October of this year. There were also developments on the Lightning Network front, mostly led by Blockstream.
The Bitcoin tech startup had claimed that its c-lightning software team was the first to release a working version of “multi-part payments”. Christian Decker, one of the developers on the LN stated:
“The user experience of lightning clients is a topic that is brought up often, and we are working actively on improving the status quo, together with the teams working on other lightning implementations. Our goal is to make using lightning as easy as using an on-chain wallet.”
Users on the platform were incentivized to open a single channel with as many funds as possible to a node that was as stable as possible. With multi-part payments, users can open multiple channels to multiple nodes.
