Bitcoin developer Paul Sztorc ruffled a number of feathers this month with a brutally blunt evaluation of the Lightning Community: Bitcoiners are mendacity to themselves about how effectively it really works.
“Most people don’t realize how bad the Lightning Network is,” Sztorc said in an October 4 submit on X, “because there has been a vast, years long conspiracy to ***lie*** about the LN user experience.”
He argued that custodial Lightning companies account for greater than 80% of funds, and described their promotion as a “vast campaign of fraud on par with Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos,” he mentioned, referring to faux blood-testing system firm whose founder was convicted of fraud.
Lightning funds are non-public by design, making it inconceivable to determine the custodial share from public community knowledge alone. Sztorc didn’t reply to Journal’s requests for remark.
However his scathing criticism resurfaces a subject Bitcoin builders have wrestled with for years: Has Lightning made Bitcoin simpler to make use of, or has the neighborhood grow to be so invested in Layer 2 protocol that it overlooks its shortcomings?
Lightning has a usability drawback
Lightning was designed to allow sooner, cheaper Bitcoin transactions with out each fee having to be individually recorded on the blockchain, however its underlying mechanics have typically created friction for customers and companies alike.
Sztorc says individuals don’t understand how dangerous the Lightning Community is. Supply: Paul Sztorc
In a one-click world the place customers of TradFi rails can faucet a card or click on a mouse to finish a transaction, Lightning’s clunky fee channels rely on liquidity being accessible in the correct locations on the proper occasions. Routing funds by way of the community can fail, particularly bigger funds requiring a number of hops by way of totally different nodes.
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Even Lightning’s head of liquidity, Alex Bosworth, said this month, “the painful truth is that in a setup with privacy and p2p etc it’s extremely slow compared to tap to pay.”
Added to that, working a node and managing channels is just means too technical for the common consumer, who simply needs to pay for stuff and get on with their day. That’s the explanation for top estimates of custodial use — it’s simpler and works higher on the expense of utilizing a trusted middleman.
On a regular basis funds have a 99.7% success charge
Jesse Shrader, co-founder and chief govt of Lightning infrastructure supplier Amboss, acknowledges that liquidity necessities are “challenging” to know at first, however he says they’re “trivial to solve” with present instruments or automation companies.
He tells Journal, “For everyday payments of around $100, most users can achieve 99% reliability in the core network,” including that Amboss’ simulations put the success charge for $100 funds at 99.66%.
Lightning exceeded $1 billion in transaction quantity in November 2025. Supply: River
Whereas that’s an encouraging benchmark, it’s not a verified, network-wide measure of everybody’s expertise in follow. As they are saying within the positive print of commercials: Your outcomes might fluctuate.
In an April 2026 Reddit dialogue, one consumer said he was “genuinely impressed” by the place the community had gotten technically, however nonetheless questioned how helpful it was for on a regular basis spending. “There is still a gap in practice,” he mentioned:
“Every coffee shop, grocery store and gas station I walk into runs on Visa or Mastercard terminals. NFC tap to pay is the standard. Nobody is running a Lightning node at the point of sale and nobody is going to.”
Have builders solved the issue?
Danny Stagg, advertising and marketing lead at Bitcoin funds infrastructure supplier Breez, says a lot of the criticism of Lightning’s consumer expertise is now outdated.
“The criticism is not fair in 2026,” he tells Journal, “but historically it was. For years, both developers and users were asked to understand the complexities of Lightning, like channels and inbound liquidity, just to get paid.”
He says the community has tremendously improved over the previous two years, with newer infrastructure abstracting a lot of that complexity away. “Non-custodial UX is now comparable with custodial,” he says.
Customers now not have to handle channels or run their very own nodes for a pockets or utility to supply Lightning funds, as builders and repair suppliers can deal with a lot of the work beneath the hood.
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Breez chief govt Roy Sheinfeld says that AI coding instruments are making it simpler for builders to construct Bitcoin-enabled purposes, and inquiries from potential companions have quickly elevated.
“That’s why we’re seeing more partners add Bitcoin every quarter,” Stagg says.
However rising developer curiosity doesn’t essentially imply extra individuals are utilizing Lightning for on a regular basis funds.
The numbers present exercise, not essentially success
In line with its 2026 Bitcoin adoption report, monetary companies firm River estimated that Lightning processed $1.17 billion in transaction volume throughout 5.22 million transactions in November 2025 alone.
Whereas that looks like a powerful quantity, it stays under Lightning’s August 2023 peak of 6.6 million transactions, suggesting transaction counts haven’t stored tempo with the worth transferring by way of the community.
Crypto fee processor CoinGate reported 782,403 paid crypto orders throughout its personal buyer base within the first half of 2026, up 21.4% yr over yr, with Lightning accounting for 9.6% of Bitcoin funds processed by way of its service.
Lightning accounted for 9.6% of Bitcoin funds. Supply: CoinGate
What would rely as success?
Shrader says that since network-level fee statistics are “impossible to produce unless you are party to the transactions themselves,” he isn’t shopping for Sztorc’s declare that greater than 80% of Lightning funds are custodial.
“I distrust anyone who claims they can prove an 80% custodial share either way from public data alone.”
Stagg says the declare “describes yesterday’s Lightning,” when custodial companies provided a neater expertise and non-custodial companies hadn’t “caught up” but. (Again in 2023, River estimated one self custodial consumer for each eight custodial customers). However with out onerous knowledge that’s updated, the custody query can’t be settled.
And the identical warning ought to apply to claims about Lightning adoption measured in metrics like fee quantity, community capability or developer curiosity; every measures one thing totally different, and none alone can set up how straightforward Lightning is to make use of.
Companies are processing funds and builders are discovering methods to summary technical complexity, however technical progress is just not the identical as mainstream usability.
The true criticism will not be that Lightning has failed, however whether or not its supporters conflate proof of what the community can do with what individuals are really doing on the community.
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