UK PayPal customers will be able to buy, sell and manage cryptocurrencies through the payment service starting this week. This was possible in the United States since October, but now for the first time in another country. CNBC writes that the crypto experiment enjoyed well in the United States.
Via Paypal, trading in Bitcoin or Ethereum is expected to be much more accessible.
This is a very positive news for the entire crypto community. But it’s not everything for today. The Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network (LN) continues to take big steps. Recently, the scaling protocol reached a new milestone, as the number of nodes has broken the 25,000. The network grew by over 8% over the last 30 days.
The LN is built on top of Bitcoin and helps relieve the network by not processing transactions directly on the main chain of Bitcoin. Transactions over the network are extremely fast and also cheap. Many Bitcoin supporters see the LN as an important part on the road to mass adoption.
Data from 1ML shows that more than 25,000 nodes are now part of this network. That’s an 8.3% growth over the last 30 days. However, the number of nodes that actually have an active channel is slightly lower. That is 14,691.
Once a node has an active channel, this means that transactions can be sent through this node. A transaction can move from A to B via several nodes, and each intermediate node has to pay a small transaction fee. Nodes that maintain an active channel and provide liquidity thus earn bitcoin in the form of transaction fees.
This liquidity is an important part of the LN. The more liquidity, the higher the capacity. Meanwhile, the network capacity is 2,319 bitcoins worth over $ 100 million. This marks an increase of 17% over the last month.
The LN thus takes good steps and continues to grow in terms of number of nodes, channels and liquidity. And with the adoption of bitcoin by El Salvador on the horizon and also other countries that may want to embrace bitcoin, it seems to lay a nice foundation for a lightning fast scaling network that allows bitcoin to actually be used in stores.
