The Lightning Network is one of the most exciting and innovative technologies built on Bitcoin, but it is also one of the most misunderstood. From early days with grassroots efforts like “Plebnet”, to the ambitious vision of lightning applications (Lapps) and the idea of gaining passive yields as a routing node operator, Lightning’s enthusiasm often outweighed its real reality.
Many Bitcoiners expect Lightning to be a seamless plug-and-play extension for the Bitcoin network. But reality is more complicated. Setup and maintaining a well-connected lightning node involves technical skills and capital requirements that most users are not ready to manage. This is not a failure. It simply reflects Lightning’s design.
As a result of these barriers, many users are turning to detained solutions to access the benefits of Lightning. Duty wallets and neobanks such as Strike, Brink, Satoshi wallets, and cash apps provide features such as lightning URLs, instant low pay transactions, and the reliability and user experience you’d expect from a fully-feasible bank-style app. For some, this dependence on custodian feels like a compromise. But even more importantly, it reveals what is often overlooked. It is not intended for anyone to implement lightning infrastructure.
Here’s the controversial part: it’s totally fine.
Both within the Bitcoin community and the altcoin promoter, Lightning critics have suggested that these trade-offs should often be framed as evidence of Lightning’s failure, and that they should completely replace them with something else. But that view misses the mark. Rather than viewing these limitations as a fatal flaw, it is much more accurate and productive to understand Lightning networks about what it really is: enterprise-grade infrastructure.
In this context, “enterprise grade” means robust, scalable and reliable enough to enhance real-time low-cost payments for mission-critical services. It’s not all casual users host themselves. Lightning is built for professional operators, including Bitcoin exchanges, payment processors, wallet developers, and technically competent community projects. For them, lightning is not a compromise, it is a competitive advantage.
Furthermore, the Lightning network complements Bitcoin in many important ways, increasingly interoperable with adjacent technologies such as Ecash Mint and other Layer 2 solutions. It serves as a global, open source, and unauthorized financial infrastructure that can be utilized by serious operators everywhere in the world. Essentially, the Lightning network has evolved into an interoperable adhesive that connects external systems to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Not everyone runs a lightning node, and that’s fine. This reality does not reduce the importance of Lightning in the Bitcoin scaling roadmap. On the contrary, lightning is the foundational layer that enables a wide range of tools and services. Far from being focused, it actually opens doors to unauthorized payments anywhere in the world and strengthens decentralization by creating new types of economic actors that were previously impossible.
A great example of this is the Bitcoin Payment AppTando in Kenya. This app allows users to use Bitcoin in merchants or services that accept M-PESA using the Lightning network.
M-PESA is a mobile money platform launched by Safaricom in Kenya that allows users to send, receive and store via mobile phones without the need for traditional bank accounts. As of 2024, it serves more than 34 million users in Kenya, processes over 30 billion transactions per year, accounting for nearly 60% of the country’s GDP.
Thanks to Lightning, Tando creators can build a seamless, programmatic payment experience that interoperates directly with the M-PESA system, dramatically improving liquidity access for Bitcoin users in Kenya. Everyone in Kenya and their grandmothers accept M-Pesa, so now with Tando, anyone can use Bitcoin anywhere in Kenya, even in Masai Mara.
Without lightning, on-chain Bitcoin payments are too late to provide real-world experience for daily M-PESA transactions. Transaction check times on the chain are not suitable for real-time payments, especially in fast-paced retail settings. However, by building a Lightning Payment Gateway that connects directly to your M-Pesa wallet, Tando has changed the payment situation for Bitcoin users in Kenya. Tando is proof that Lightning unlocks real-world use cases for builders without having to ask for permission to build. The fact that lightning allows this is surprising.
Another great example of Edge Lightning can be seen by comparing PayPal and Strike by comparing two global neobanks.
The original internet payment company, PayPal, was launched in 1998 and took over 17 years to expand to over 200 countries. In contrast, a much more niche application launched in 2020 based on lightning, Strike has already rolled out in over 100 countries in just five years, reaching markets in Africa, Latin America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The global expansion of Strike not only outperforms PayPal’s scope rivals, but also dramatically outweighs its own advantages of building on modern, boundless infrastructure like the Lightning network.
Strike CEO Jack Mullers and his team chose to detour primarily in direct cooperation with banks and instead partner with Bitcoin exchanges around the world, where local banking relationships were already established in the markets they serve. These partners use Lightning networks to send value instantly across boundaries. If users want to convert strike app balance to local currency, the partner will encourage the exchange of backends. This strategy allowed strikes to launch a global payments service that encourages universally accepted immediate lightning payments faster than ever.
We will leverage the borderless capabilities of Bitcoin and Lightning that leverage Strike to combine this technical edge with strong business development to ensure the Fiat Transformation Partnership. Legacy players remain bottlenecked by traditional bank rails, but Strike uses lightning to instantly move value anywhere on the planet.
Lightning Network not only opens new doors for businesses, but also allows for unauthorized payments, both large and small, within other open protocols. The best example of this is NoStr, a distributed protocol designed to support social media experiences and more.
In a post on X, Jack Dorsey said, “The biggest at-scale example of Bitcoin is because daily payments are Nostr’s Zaps.” In an interview with Politico in 2023, he discusses his grounded optimism for both Nostring and Lightning-enabled Zaps.
“He also argued that the user experience on Nostr has already outperformed the Twitter experience. “Zaps” is part of a vision where information and money flows within the Internet without interfering, a feature that users tilt each other in Bitcoin. ”
Nostr’s Zaps have evolved from a basic Lightning Invoice system to primarily seamless micropayment functionality thanks to the efforts of William Casarin, known as the JB55. Initially, users had to manually attach Bitcoin payment requests to notes. However, in early 2023, Casarin, creator of the Damus client, created the NIP-57 and introduced event types 9734 (ZAP Request) and 9735 (ZAP Receipt).
Based on Nostr’s early lightning integration, Casarin’s vision helped transform Zaps into a native, user-friendly feature across all prominent Nostr clients. With the introduction of Zaps, Nostr adoption has skyrocketed. By June 2023, Nostr users had sent over 1 million Zaps across a network with around 500,000 users.
Zaps, which requires only Lightning Wallet and Nostr clients, eliminated intermediaries and allowed creators to receive direct, low-cost payments for posts, streams, or other content. This seamless integration of social interaction and the lightning economy of Bitcoin has redefine the way in which one small or large transaction can be exchanged online at a time.
Casual users usually don’t manage their own, always-always-only lightning infrastructure, but networks empower small teams and skilled individuals who can provide financial services that once require banks. This dynamic has evolved rapidly, becoming a broader trend, driving lightning towards higher decentralization through community-based infrastructure.
Imagine every local Bitcoin Meetup, someone is running lightning for the community. This makes modern and trustworthy operators in your neighborhood or region almost the same as modern credit unions. In such a model, lightning infrastructure is not dominated by large enterprise nodes alone. Instead, trust and routing are distributed to small, localized actors with a variety of incentives, builders who prioritize resilience, privacy and accessibility over scale or profit.
This dynamic is already happening too! We are actually doing this through initiatives such as Praia Bitcoin in Brazil and LA Crypta in Argentina. Both projects combine grassroots communities with locally managed payment systems built on lightning. Together, Bitcoin and the Lightning Network are enabling grassroots alternatives to traditional banks. That’s beautiful.
Finally, not to mention many incredible projects, such as Zeus, Phoenix, Breez, Aqua, Muun, and other lightning wallets that are innovating to create diverse user experiences. These teams are building feature-rich applications without sacrificing user custody while navigating the still wild frontier of Bitcoin payments in 2025. Offering a great, incompatible payment experience is not a small feat, as Bitcoin and lightning remain niche and speculative behaviour is ramping as much as ever. It’s not perfect, but many of these projects do just that. The fact that so many builders offer such a wide range of ways to interact with lightning gives consumers a real choice and ultimately reinforces my core debate.
The Lightning Network is not intended to serve all users in any way, and that’s exactly why it works. It won’t fail, as casual users may prefer custody wallets. It’s successful because developers, businesses and organizers use it to solve real problems without the need for permission.
What Lightning offers is focused and highly leveraged software rather than universal simplicity. It is an infrastructure that bridges Bitcoin to people and provides innovative solutions to the edge of the global economy. When we stop hoping that lightning will become something we cannot do, we begin to understand its true purpose: the dynamic and fundamental layer for those who will build a future of financial freedom.
Don’t miss the chance to own it The problem of lightning -Features an exclusive interview with Lightning co-creator Tadge Dryja. Dive deep into Bitcoin’s most powerful scaling layer. Limited execution. Available only while consumables continue.
This is an article featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s latest print edition, The Lightning Issue. Share it here to show the ideas investigated through the complete question.
