The growth of the Lightning Network has been remarkable. But there's a catch.

Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s second layer payment protocol, has seen significant growth last year. The first Lightning implementation developed by Lightning Labs launched in beta in March 2018. The other two (main) implementations developed by ACINQ and Blockstream followed in late March and late June respectively.

In a little under a year since being live on mainnet, there are now nearly 2,800 nodes with active channels and about 20,000 total channels. The steeper node growth in the last three months could potentially be connected to the release of the Casa Lightning Node, which made running a node significantly easier for a regular non-technical user.