Further on, substantial project activity is observed in wallet and gaming segments (90 or 28%) indicating that consumer use cases are dominating the minds of developers.Yes, we are building a financial system first of all! Financial infrastructure and LiFi (a term supposedly introduced in the Lightning Labs newsletter) is the second prevailing segment (49 or 15%).The share of this category when combined with Node management would be 120 or 37%) Software components and developer tools came out as the single most represented category with 77 (25%) of all projects indicating that we are now in the active phase of building out the infrastructure layer.Ecosystem growth is mainly driven by Lightning native projects (282 started in 2017 and later) but adoption of the technology among incumbent crypto companies is also notable (40 companies founded prior to 2017 claim lightning support).322 apps/projects were observed as part of the Lightning ecosystem (for quick reference the numbers were around 93 and 151 in 20 respectively).Over 400 merchants claim support for LN payments with the number growing steadily at almost constant pace.We optimized for building an overall picture rather than a concise catalogue and we mostly used already existing catalogues that we are very grateful to (links to catalogues in Appendix 2). References to logos and projects below are used for illustration only, they do not represent a project’s perceived position in the ecosystem and not present an endorsement by the researchers.ĭue to the overall moderate or low to no publicity and private nature of some developments, not all projects may have been covered in the research although we tried to perform cross-checks and seek external review and advice where possible. Our main goal is to establish an open framework for future research collaborations that will help make the Lightning Network a mainstream technology in the modern world where decentralization, privacy and financial independence are slowly but evidently becoming important topics on the agenda of diverse social groups. This research was conducted during summer-autumn 2020 and was based in part on the preceding works of 20 and using many of the valuable resources maintained in the community (references in Appendix 2). But a comprehensive quantitative analysis was yet to be performed and we believe that this attempt paves the way to further systematic exploration of the ecosystem that will help answer questions about the domains of applicability of the Lightning Network and its incredible but yet to be fully uncovered economic and social potential. Ongoing qualitative research on the advantages and disadvantages of technology² is providing reasonable evidence of the progress and remaining challenges, and the ecosystem has recently enjoyed more interest from the venture capital industry³’⁴. Progress of development and user adoption in the Lightning Network ecosystem has not been making frequent headlines in the media and has from time to time given rise to debate about the current state of the technology and it’s readiness for broader use¹. While the direction of future research will most likely be from a VC angle, this is rather an academic attempt to enumerate, and classify the projects, highlighting emerging trends and open questions. In this article we attempt to lay out background and foundations for systematic research of the Lightning Network as an ecosystem of projects, startups and products that drive adoption of the technology in various use cases. Building an overview of the Lightning Network ecosystem
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