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- Signal Over Noise: How Emerging Markets Are Powering Lightning Growth 🎧🔌⚡
Though the Western-centric crypto news cycle these past few months has been dominated by halted withdrawals, bankruptcy, and fraud, the global Lightning community continues to grow with a relentless focus on solving real problems for real people. In BTC terms, public network capacity increased 50% in 2022, and a staggering 373% since January 2021.
Importantly, this growth is especially occurring in emerging markets, from users that are not loud on Twitter, and may not even speak English. This month has seen several announcements on that front which we are excited to highlight here.
Nearly all of our conversations with Lightning users in emerging markets center around the fact that using fiat payment rails in these areas is a nightmarish experience. High fees (especially when transferring internationally), consistent outages, censored payments, and more are the norm in these regions instead of the exception like they are in the developed world. Lightning today provides fees on the order of 1-20 bps (10-100x lower than fiat rails), with constant uptime, uncensorable payments, and provides the exact same experience whether users are buying groceries locally, or tipping a creator internationally. For a wide swath of emerging markets payments use cases, Lightning is already better than legacy payment rails, and international users are adopting it out of necessity.
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