Who are the biggest players on Bitcoin's Lightning Network? This list ranks the exchanges, wallets, payment companies, LSPs and routing nodes with the most Bitcoin committed to Lightning channels. Sizes come straight from the public network graph, and are updated every hour. Below the table, you'll find a profile of each of the top 42: who runs it, where it's based, and what it actually does on Lightning.
Profiles last reviewed October 2026.
544.6 BTC across 1,037 channels
A leading exchange, and the force behind the Tether stablecoin (the two companies share a parent, iFinex), Bitfinex was an early adopter of the Lightning Network: In December 2019, it became the first exchange to support Lightning deposits and withdrawals. Their nodes are well-known among the Lightning cognoscenti as sinks -- meaning, payments tend to route in, but don't route out. Following Tether's 2025 move to El Salvador, Bitfinex has been collecting licenses there too. Bitfinex remains off-limits for United States residents.
369.3 BTC across 1,118 channels
Run by an unknown person or company, LnBig is definitely an early Bitcoin holder with significant wealth, given the amount of funds they have deployed onto the network. From their (scant) published communication, it's also unlikely that they are a native English speaker. Beyond this, not much is known about where LnBig operates from, or what their real identity is. LnBig has long sold inbound channels to other node-runners, but in the fall of 2026 it paused new channel opens, citing a wave of automated, AI-assisted attacks on Bitcoin and Lightning services, and promising a new version of the service in the coming months. Routing continues as usual.
343.2 BTC across 136 channels
The world's biggest crypto exchange. Many market observers have theorized that the company operates in a similar way to FTX: Co-mingling customer and corporate funds for the purpose of propping up the exchange's proprietary token, BNB. Binance has also been accused of trading against their own users, among other verboten practices. Unlike FTX, Binance survived the market rout of 2022, though not without consequences: In November 2023, Binance pleaded guilty to US charges and agreed to pay $4.3 billion, and founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) pleaded guilty as well, serving four months in prison -- before receiving a presidential pardon in October 2025. With ever more high-priced marketing, featuring ever more well-known Football players, Binance is sure to continue to attract the masses. Binance has supported Lightning deposits and withdrawals since 2023. Binance.com remains off-limits for United States users.
266.9 BTC across 1,760 channels
ACINQ serves as an on-ramp for Phoenix wallet's mobile users, providing them with inbound liquidity so they can send and receive lightning payments easily. Rather than juggling many channels, Phoenix gives each user a single channel, which grows and shrinks on the fly via splicing. ACINQ does things differently: Their node runs on the Eclair implementation, written in Scala, which doesn't always play nicely with LND and Core Lightning, the two mainstream node implementations on the network, written in Go and C, respectively. Some node-runners have complained that ACINQ can close channels in unexpected ways. But ACINQ is a step ahead of other wallet/node combinations, thanks to the wizardry of developers like t-bast, a core Eclair developer and a prolific contributor to the Lightning specification. In May 2024, citing regulatory uncertainty, ACINQ pulled Phoenix from US app stores, but the wallet returned to the US in April 2025.
235.8 BTC across 530 channels
Block's consumer-facing wallet Cash App, with millions of users, is one of the biggest users of the Lightning Network, and since late 2025, Cash App users can pay Lightning invoices directly from their dollar balance. Block has also begun rolling out Lightning payments to merchants who use its Square point-of-sale system, which could make Square the biggest merchant on-ramp the network has ever seen. Block's public Lightning nodes, now named block-iad-1 and block-pdx-1, were formerly branded c=, the name of the Lightning Service Provider business Block launched in 2023. In May 2025, Block disclosed that its routing node was earning a yield of roughly 9.7% annually -- a rare public data point on the economics of routing, though not one that most smaller node-runners should expect to replicate.
235.6 BTC across 492 channels
Los Angeles-based LightSpark intends to bring the Lightning Network to the suits by simplifying usage of the network and (supposedly) providing legal compliance guarantees. To this end, they've raised a boat-load of venture capital funding, which they are enthusiastically spending at their high-rent headquarters in west LA. After an interminable delay, Lightspark finally rolled out Coinbase's support for Lightning in April, 2024. LightSpark is headed by ex-PayPal head David Marcus, who also worked on Facebook's ill-fated crypto project, Diem. Since then, Lightspark has turned much of its attention to Spark, its own Bitcoin layer 2 for bitcoin and stablecoins, which launched in April 2025, and which can send and receive Lightning payments. Spark has been adopted by a number of Lightning wallets, including Wallet of Satoshi. In October 2025, Lightspark also launched Grid, a system for moving money between countries over Bitcoin rails, with customers including Revolut and SoFi.
208.0 BTC across 432 channels
Headed by the charismatic Jack Mallers, Strike has been pushing for retailer adoption of the Lightning Network, so far with limited success. A noted Bitcoin bull, Mallers regularly appears on CNBC and other financial news networks to promote Bitcoin. In 2025, Mallers also became CEO of Twenty One Capital, a Tether- and SoftBank-backed bitcoin treasury company, but stepped down in July 2026 after a proposed merger between Strike and Twenty One fell apart, declaring "My Bitcoin company is Strike." Strike has been expanding rapidly, launching in Africa, Europe, the UK and, in March 2026, New York, and now offers bitcoin-backed loans alongside buying, selling, and Lightning payments.
198.3 BTC across 171 channels
FixedFloat claims to be a non-custodial exchange, meaning that user funds can't be accessed by exchange insiders, but this claim is difficult to verify, especially because the exchange has frozen user funds for security reasons at times, and since the exchange lost roughly $26 million in Bitcoin and Ether in a February 2024 hack -- followed by a second, smaller hack just six weeks later. FixedFloat, which now operates from the domain ff.io, has no publicly-known headquarters, and like other exchanges offering various forms of altcoin gaming, users should exercise caution.
160.0 BTC across 389 channels
Registered in the Seychelles, with a regional hub in Dubai, this exchange and 24/7 altcoin-gaming hotspot does enormous traffic, and routes significant payments through the Lightning Network. To grab the attention of slow-witted normies, OKX has sponsored multiple sports celebrities, including F1 drivers, snowboarders, and football players. In addition to buying and selling Bitcoin, OKX offers an appealing array of different ways for their users to get rekt by investing in fly-by-night altcoins and NFTs. In February 2025, OKX pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in the US, paying about $504 million in penalties. Just two months later, OKX relaunched in the United States, with a new US headquarters in San Jose, California.
136.8 BTC across 332 channels
Flashsats is a pseudonymous LSP (Lightning Service Provider), which sells inbound channels to new nodes that can't yet receive payments. It was launched on Stacker News in 2023 by a user called 1sats, whose only published bio describes a 20-year software veteran, bitcoiner and angel investor, and it's built into Alby Hub as one of its liquidity providers. Flashsats pitches itself as a small-scale operation, but its two nodes together hold well over 100 BTC, making it one of the biggest operations on the network. With its website currently offline, that's about all that's publicly known.
135.8 BTC across 429 channels
Now free from their multi-year legal battle with the SEC, which dropped its case in March 2025, Kraken (legally Payward, Inc.) is a veteran bitcoin exchange, known for an obsession with security, and for staying online when Coinbase goes down. (Which is often.) Kraken unabashedly offers altcoin gaming to its audience: thus the complications with the SEC. Attempts to expand internationally have been uneven, with multiple openings and closures in Japan, and a short-lived office in Abu Dhabi. Kraken supports Lightning deposits and withdrawals, and in March 2026, Kraken's Wyoming-chartered bank became the first digital-asset bank to be granted a Federal Reserve master account. A long-anticipated IPO has reportedly been pushed back to 2027, at the earliest.
84.3 BTC across 399 channels
Nicehash buys and sells hashing power, a notoriously sketchy business model, which allows customers to use their own computing power, or rent computing power, to mine (mostly) altcoins. In almost all cases, their customers would do better by simply buying Bitcoin, and doing nothing further. NiceHash does have a straightforward use-case for the Lightning Network, however: Their users constantly receive very small BTC payment amounts, and since March 2024, NiceHash has been paying them out over Lightning, every four hours, without on-chain fees. Nominally headquartered in the British Virgin Islands, NiceHash was founded in, and mostly operates from, Slovenia.
81.8 BTC across 361 channels
Megalith is a routing node focused on high uptime and reliability, and also an LSP (Lightning Service Provider), opening inbound channels to other nodes through the LSPS1 and LSPS2 standards. We run Megalith, along with this website, as a way to provide an entertaining and educational introduction to the Lightning Network, to help people discover what the network has to offer. For more information, see the home page.
81.4 BTC across 59 channels
Well-financed San Francisco startup headed by Elizabeth Stark. Lightning Labs is the maker of the most popular Lightning node implementation: LND. It's difficult to compile exact statistics, since Lightning nodes don't directly announce their software stack, but many node-runners estimate that at least 60% of the nodes on the network run LND. And this isn't by accident: LND, written in the language Go, is by far the most well-documented implementation, with the biggest online community. LND is definitely not simple to use, however, and generally should only be run by an experienced developer who is comfortable with Linux and the command line. Lightning Labs' biggest public node is simply called LOOP, which, like many parts of the Lightning Network, has a confusing name. The LOOP node runs a service, also called Loop, which enables automated exchanges between Bitcoin locked into the Lightning Network and on-chain Bitcoin, that is, Bitcoin that is not locked onto the Lightning Network, and can be freely spent. Lightning Labs has also spent years building Taproot Assets, a protocol for issuing other assets -- most notably, stablecoins -- on Bitcoin, and sending them over Lightning; in January 2025, Tether announced that it would bring its USDT stablecoin to Bitcoin and Lightning using the protocol.
71.3 BTC across 187 channels
Authenticity is the main node of AuthenticityBTC, an anonymous operation which runs two routing nodes, Authenticity and the much smaller Integrity, both hosted on Amazon's cloud in Oregon. The operator hasn't said who they are, but is unusually open about the node itself: its website publishes a live, anonymized feed of the payments routing through Authenticity, along with stats on how busy it is compared with its own normal. Running since early 2024, Authenticity uses dynamic fees and automatic rebalancing, asks for channels of at least 10 million sats, and warns that channels left idle for more than 30 days may be closed.
65.4 BTC across 107 channels
One of the most prolific developers on the Lightning Network, Bosworth created, and regularly updates, the utility package Balance Of Satoshis, written in Node.js, which offers a bewildering array of convenience services built on the LND node implementation. An active commenter on the state of the Network, Alex has some interesting perspectives on preserving the health of the network. For one, he refuses to engage in fee wars, instead opting to keep the fees for outgoing payments from his node very high. He has said that he does this to ensure that his channels will always be able to route payments, and never become drained. Bosworth is also a longtime engineer at Lightning Labs, working on its Loop service.
64.2 BTC across 132 channels
LifeIsGood is another big, anonymous routing node, which first appeared in early 2024. For a long time it was reachable only over Tor, before adding a regular internet address, on a Hetzner server in Germany, in September 2026. Its operator, who goes by Josef on Nostr, has published little else about the node beyond a Latin motto, et lux in tenebris lucet (and the light shines in the darkness), and a minimum channel size of 3 million sats.
61.9 BTC across 71 channels
Cyberdyne was a routing node, that is, it existed primarily to intermediate between other nodes on the network. This is a complex enterprise, as the very detailed channel policy once published on Cyberdyne's website made clear. But the operator has now called it a day: The website reads simply "Thanks for all the fun, operations are now suspended," and the node, renamed cyberdyne.sh (shutting down), is winding down its channels.
60.9 BTC across 107 channels
Los Angeles-based OpenNode was one of the first payment processors to support the Lightning Network. After a $20m funding round in 2022, OpenNode has been working to onboard merchants to Bitcoin payments, which has been a difficult task. One notable integration was with McDonald's in El Salvador, which began accepting Lightning payments through OpenNode in 2021, when the country made Bitcoin legal tender. (In January 2025, as part of a deal with the IMF, El Salvador made accepting Bitcoin voluntary for businesses.)
55.0 BTC across 118 channels
The Continental -- presumably named for the hotel for assassins in the John Wick films -- is a large, anonymous routing node, which has been on the network since 2021, and used to go by the name rasputin. It's hosted in Iceland, and its operator, who keeps a low profile on Nostr, has published nothing about who they are; the website once linked from the node's profile now leads to a parked domain.
51.9 BTC across 90 channels
One of the longest-running Bitcoin businesses in Vietnam -- founded in 2013, and still run by its original team -- BitcoinVN now operates through a company registered in Panama, and works mostly as an instant swap service, with no account needed for most swaps. Vietnamese customers can still buy and sell with dong, and BitcoinVN runs one of the bigger Lightning routing nodes in Southeast Asia. A significant amount of the crypto activity in Southeast Asia revolves around play-to-earn games, resulting in huge volumes of very small payments, which is a natural fit for Lightning. BitcoinVN also allows rapid trading on altcoins, and offers sketchy staking opportunities, with advertised yields as high as 27%. One lesson that hopefully even the most confused day-traders might have learned from the FTX debacle: Caution is advised when dealing with any exchange or token which offers high yields.
49.1 BTC across 128 channels
Speed aims to be the Stripe for Bitcoin. It has a slick mobile wallet, and offers an enterprise service providing access to Lightning payments for merchants -- most notably the burger chain Steak 'n Shake, which began accepting Lightning payments at its US locations through Speed in May 2025. In December 2025, Tether co-led an $8 million investment in Speed, which is a natural fit: Speed's wallet also handles Tether's USDT stablecoin, and its gold token, XAUT. Speed's operating company, Speed1 Inc., lists offices in Las Vegas, Dubai and Ahmedabad, India.
46.7 BTC across 113 channels
Another large, anonymous routing node, which first appeared in July 2025. Its operator promises large, well-connected channels, along with active fee management and rebalancing, and asks for channels of at least 0.1 BTC. As the name suggests, the node appears to run on LND. Nothing is publicly known about who operates it, or from where.
46.3 BTC across 219 channels
Torq, built by Oslo-based LN Capital, is a management layer that companies can run on top of existing CLN and LND installations. It can automate the opening and closing of channels, fees, rebalancing, and more. Like other automation solutions, a word of caution: You will be better off waiting to use something like this until you already have a very stable CLN or LND node running, and have experimented extensively with doing these same tasks manually. If you immediately start with automation, especially for sensitive operations like channel opens and channels closes, you could have a bad time. The node listed here is run by a member of the LN Capital team, and, by its own account, is 100% managed by Torq.
45.0 BTC across 117 channels
An anonymous routing node, which first appeared on the network in November 2025, and has grown quickly since. The name is a nod to the Uncle Jim idea in Bitcoin circles: the technically-minded family member who runs the infrastructure, so that friends and family don't have to. Sure enough, the operator describes it as a community node, providing liquidity to friends and family. Beyond this, nothing is publicly known about who runs it.
44.7 BTC across 35 channels
One of the first online casinos to support the Lightning Network, BC.GAME claims that their games are provably fair, whatever that means. BC.GAME is now operated by Twocent Technology Limited, under a gambling license from Anjouan, an island in the Comoros, and the website is strictly off-limits for residents of the United States.
43.9 BTC across 41 channels
Yet another Stripe for crypto, this one is difficult to figure out. They are definitely sending traffic through the Lightning Network, and their nodes keep growing, but their website, which once consisted of little more than marketing copy and an email address, has now gone dark entirely. Please contact us if you have any better information about this service. Their Lightning nodes are hosted on Amazon's cloud in Frankfurt, but their actual location is unknown.
37.7 BTC across 145 channels
Blink began life as the Bitcoin Beach Wallet, built by Galoy for the Bitcoin Beach community in El Salvador, and has since spun off from Galoy as its own company. Blink's wallet includes a cash register for merchants, making incoming payments easy and straightforward, and in June 2026 Blink added non-custodial accounts, built on Lightspark's Spark. Blink is now incorporated in Próspera, a special economic zone in Honduras, which issued it a financial services license in December 2025; in the United States, users can only access its non-custodial mode. In September 2026, an attacker exploited a flaw in Blink's admin tools to take 6.61 BTC from 24 custodial accounts. Blink restored the affected balances in full, at its shareholders' expense, five days later.
29.8 BTC across 129 channels
Based primarily in Central America, IBEX started out with a point-of-sale system that allowed merchants to accept Lightning payments, but has since moved to the back office: IBEX now sells a clearing and settlement engine to banks, fintechs and exchanges, moving bitcoin over Lightning -- along with stablecoins and local currencies -- between countries in Latin America and beyond. IBEX also claims that, in 2021, transactions from El Salvador's government-run Chivo wallet were routed through its Lightning infrastructure.
28.7 BTC across 459 channels
LQWD is testing a novel theory: What if a company could raise capital from investors, on the stock market, on the back of the size of their Lightning Network nodes? Certainly, a similar theory has worked in the past for Bitcoin miners, who now for years have been profitably selling shares on stock exchanges around the world. Listed on Canada's TSX Venture Exchange, LQWD touts the size, and geographical breadth, of its network of routing nodes, along with a corporate treasury of more than 250 BTC. More recently, LQWD has started selling inbound channels to wallets and apps, and has -- inevitably -- announced an AI angle, with agents to automate liquidity and routing. NASDAQ, here we come!
28.5 BTC across 125 channels
Bitrefill operates a surprisingly efficient offramp for Bitcoin holders: Gift cards. Make a lightning payment, and within seconds, a user gets a virtual gift card, which can be used at merchants like amazon.com -- with no account or ID required, for purchases of up to $500 a day. This is one of the first and most successful usages of the Lightning Network for real-world commerce. In March 2026, Bitrefill was hacked by attackers it believes to be North Korea's Lazarus group, who drained its hot wallets and accessed records of 18,500 purchases. Bitrefill says it will absorb the losses.
22.5 BTC across 42 channels
LN Markets lets users trade Bitcoin futures, settled over Lightning, with leverage of up to 100x -- so there are many ways to get rekt, and quickly. In October 2026, LN Markets added qAssets: bitcoin-settled futures on the prices of gold, oil, and stocks like Nvidia and Tesla. The exchange is operated by a company registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and is off-limits for users in the United States.
21.4 BTC across 52 channels
Electrum, the venerable desktop Bitcoin wallet, added Lightning support some years ago, and took an unusual approach: Rather than making every wallet download and process the entire network graph, Electrum relies on trampoline routing, in which the wallet hands a payment off to a trampoline node, which finds the route on its behalf. This is Electrum's own trampoline node, hard-coded into the wallet's open-source code. Electrum is developed by Electrum Technologies GmbH.
20.9 BTC across 80 channels
CWallet's corporate home is something of a moving target: Its terms of service name a company in Slovakia, which is applying for a license under the EU's MiCA regulations, while its homepage lists a holding company in Ontario, Canada. Either way, CWallet bears the hallmarks of the crypto industry, where almost all the money is made by pumping (and dumping) altcoins. The wallet supports hundreds of altcoins, as well as NFTs, memecoin trading and perpetual futures, providing their users with ample opportunities to lose funds in new and entertaining ways. CWallet's blog, featuring such insights as "In today's fast-paced digital world, secure payment platforms are essential for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve" is suspiciously close to something ChatGPT might generate. Caution is advised.
20.2 BTC across 53 channels
Bitcoin-only from the outset, San Francisco-based River (which also runs an operations center in Columbus, Ohio) has refused to engage with altcoin-gambling, and offers simple, reliable services for buying, selling, and holding Bitcoin. In April 2026, River went a step further, launching bitcoin banking, with customers' dollar balances held at an FDIC-insured partner bank. Under CEO Alex Leishman, River has been an active proponent of the Lightning Network, and periodically releases reports tracking the growth of the network: its 2026 report estimated Lightning payment volume at more than $1 billion a month.
19.2 BTC across 29 channels
Hong Kong-based hardware wallet provider OneKey routes significant traffic over the Lightning Network. Funded by noted altcoin-friendly VC firms like Coinbase Ventures, and, more recently, YZi Labs (formerly known as Binance Labs), this provider leans to the rekt side of the crypto industry, as they aggressively market NFTs (non-fungible tokens), as well as highly volatile altcoins, to their audience. Due to their selection of altcoins, many of OneKey's services are off-limits for United States residents.
18.5 BTC across 63 channels
One of the newest big nodes on the network, Porcino -- named, judging by the emoji, for the porcini mushroom -- first appeared in March 2026, under the name MED1AN0CHE. Its operator has published nothing about the node, or about who runs it.
17.4 BTC across 1,298 channels
CoinGate is a Lithuanian payment processor which also sells gift cards. CoinGate accepts payments via the Lightning Network, which is enabled by default for its merchants, along with about a dozen other crypto assets, and offers Binance Pay as a checkout option for businesses outside the United States -- which might be useful for international retailers, whose customers might already be Binance users. In December 2025, CoinGate received a license from the Bank of Lithuania under the EU's new MiCA regulations.
16.9 BTC across 44 channels
The Breez SDK is a software framework that developers can use to build Lightning wallets and other applications that use the Network. Breez claims their solutions are non-custodial, or self-custodial, meaning that users do not have to trust centralized exchanges or other institutions to custody their funds. Breez's CEO Roy Sheinfeld invented the term lightning service provider, or LSP. More recently, Breez has thrown its weight behind Spark, the Bitcoin layer 2 developed by Lightspark: Since 2025, the Breez SDK has come in a Spark-based version, and Breez itself operates as a Spark service provider. In 2026, Breez added stablecoin payments to its SDK, and launched Glow, an open-source wallet app built on it.
14.7 BTC across 182 channels
BitGo is a veteran institutional custodian, safeguarding assets for exchanges, funds and other businesses: Bitcoin, but also many altcoins and stablecoins. In December 2025, BitGo received approval to become a federally chartered national trust bank, and in January 2026, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange. BitGo's Lightning efforts are aimed squarely at institutions: In June 2026 it launched Lightning Earn, built with Amboss, which lets institutional clients put custodied bitcoin to work in a routing node, earning routing and leasing fees -- and BitGo seeded it with 10 BTC of its own. A node named BitGo Routing Node appeared a few months before that launch, though BitGo hasn't publicly identified the node as its own.
13.2 BTC across 85 channels
Backed by a $6 million seed round led by Jack Dorsey in 2023, Santa Monica's Azteco is trying to spread Bitcoin adoption in the Global South by selling vouchers: codes which can be redeemed for Bitcoin, either on-chain or over the Lightning Network. Originally sold as paper cards through local merchants, Azteco vouchers are now mostly sold online, through digital marketplaces like G2A and Kinguin, starting from $10. It's an ambitious project, and one which will have significant obstacles to overcome on the way to widespread adoption.
11.9 BTC across 125 channels
Open Hand is the Core Lightning routing node behind Mountainlake, a small Swiss project run by Marius Messerli, and connected with the Bitcoin meetup in Weesen, Switzerland. Mountainlake runs a remarkable amount of Bitcoin infrastructure for such a small operation: a Lightning wallet service (built on LNbits), Cashu ecash mints, an Electrum server, a mempool explorer, and mining pool endpoints. Small-scale community infrastructure like this is very much what Bitcoin's early proponents had in mind.