Why is it Taking So Long For Lightning to be Adopted?

The first thing that an average person in the crypto industry would ask when something new is introduced to them is the following: ‘But does it have a token?’

If the answer is no, they tend to simply move on to something that does.

Almost every scaling project on other networks have introduced a token, created a foundation with a considerable amount of said token allocated to it.

If there is no token yet, you can expect them to signal their intention to introduce one in the future, due to sheer pressure from the community.

These tokens are airdropped to users who have made transactions on their network, incentivising usage. To incentivise people to lock up liquidity on the various DeFi protocols that have deployed on the network, liquidity mining incentives in the form of these tokens are doled out.

There are some glaring shortcomings of these rollups in terms of decentralisation which they have yet to achieve in any capacity. Whether or not these tokens have lead to blissful ignorance about these shortcomings, or to what is commonly referred to as copium in the form of future promises which may or may not be kept, is not something we’d like to interpret.

But the following facts can’t be denied:

1. Sequencers and Provers are not distributed among various entities in these rollups, and there is no way for it to be that way at the moment.

2. Governance is not sufficiently decentralised, with teams claiming that it will be in the near future.

3. Rollups are not interoperable with each other.

We are not taking a stance on how solvable these problems are. They might be solved in the future, or not. There are some undeniably capable people working in that space and we don’t doubt their competence. If or when they get solved, we’ll be celebrating it. We only want to take an honest look at the supposed alternatives to scaling that exist in the market right now, and acknowledge the incentives that have existed to drive the market towards their direction.

As people actively building products on the Lightning Network, we’re acutely aware of the various technical bottlenecks that exist in it too, and of the efforts being made towards overcoming them. However, the community’s acceptable and non-acceptable trade-offs at the protocol level is something we align with, as we think the right problems will be prioritised.

But in this context, we want to explore why the market has taken a lot of time to adopt LN in a meaningful manner.

It is definitely possible to scale the network to billions of people, if we are all okay with using custodial solutions to do so. The network is certainly capable of that.

But the community clearly does not want that, shown from their constant pressure and criticism on those willing to make the wrong tradeoffs.

Having a token is not a worthy tradeoff to make in favour of faster adoption of the network by the market. And so, building the Lighting Network and its infrastructure will have to be a bottom-up effort. This can lead to certain challenges.