lightning_network — Bitcoin Lightning Network (2019-2023)

Description

Snapshots of the Lightning Network, the network of payment channels built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, from the geolocated topology snapshots of V. Valko and J. Marx Gómez, who reconstructed them from the gossip messages collected by C. Decker (the lnresearch topology datasets) and geolocated the nodes with the IP addresses they announce. Nodes are Lightning nodes (identified by their public keys), and each payment channel between two nodes gives two directed edges, one for each direction of the channel ("half-channel"), with the fees and limits announced for that direction; the edges point to the node given as their destination in the dataset. The dataset has 336 snapshots from January 2019 to July 2023; the networks here are the last snapshot of each year (2019_11_18, 2020_12_30, 2021_10_10, 2022_06_05 and 2023_07_16). The capacities of the channels (which are not part of the gossip messages) are not given.

The networks have the following properties:

(Node) pubkey: the public key of the node (its identifier in the network).
(Node) alias: the alias announced by the node.
(Node) rgb_color: the color announced by the node.
(Node) features: the feature bits announced by the node (hexadecimal).
(Node) addresses: the network addresses announced by the node (IPv4, IPv6 or Tor), or empty.
(Node) timestamp: the time of the node's last announcement, in Unix time (0 or -1 if none).
(Node) city, region, country, postal, timezone, org: the geolocation of the node's IP address (with IPinfo), or empty for the nodes that were not geolocated (e.g. Tor nodes).
(Node) latitude, longitude: the coordinates of the geolocation (NaN if not geolocated).
(Edge) scid: the short channel identifier (block height, transaction index and output index of the funding transaction), with the direction bit of the half-channel (e.g. 641702x1022x1/0).
(Edge) timestamp: the time of the last update of the half-channel, in Unix time.
(Edge) features: the feature bits of the channel (hexadecimal).
(Edge) fee_base_msat, fee_proportional_millionths: the base fee (in millisatoshis) and the proportional fee (in millionths) to forward payments.
(Edge) htlc_minimum_msat, htlc_maximum_msat: the minimum and maximum amounts of a forwarded payment, in millisatoshis.
(Edge) cltv_expiry_delta: the number of blocks of the time lock delta of the half-channel.

Tags

Economic Cryptocurrency Technological Timestamps Metadata

Added

2026-10-31

Citation

V. Valko and J. Marx Gómez, "Geolocated Lightning Network topology snapshots: A dataset covering 2019-2023." Scientific Data 12, 1939 (2025) 10.1038/s41597-025-06413-7 Sci-Hub
C. Decker, "Lightning Network Research - Topology Datasets." Zenodo (2020) 10.5281/zenodo.4088530 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2OAVO6
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/2OAVO6
https://github.com/lnresearch/topology

Upstream license

CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Networks

Tip: click on a column header to sort the list, or hover over it for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$c$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
2019_11_18	4,389	24,510	5.58	40.57	81.04	423.66	-0.29	0.07	9	1.00	Directed	Unipartite	pubkey alias rgb_color features addresses timestamp city region country postal timezone org latitude longitude	scid features fee_base_msat fee_proportional_millionths htlc_minimum_msat htlc_maximum_msat cltv_expiry_delta timestamp	675 KiB	806 KiB	800 KiB	818 KiB
2020_12_30	6,553	29,087	4.44	38.97	85.33	55.10	-0.29	0.06	7	1.00	Directed	Unipartite	pubkey alias rgb_color features addresses timestamp city region country postal timezone org latitude longitude	scid features fee_base_msat fee_proportional_millionths htlc_minimum_msat htlc_maximum_msat cltv_expiry_delta timestamp	917 KiB	1.1 MiB	1.1 MiB	1.1 MiB
2021_10_10	14,112	64,810	4.59	46.98	101.15	31.56	-0.22	0.03	8	0.99	Directed	Unipartite	pubkey alias rgb_color features addresses timestamp city region country postal timezone org latitude longitude	scid features fee_base_msat fee_proportional_millionths htlc_minimum_msat htlc_maximum_msat cltv_expiry_delta timestamp	2.0 MiB	2.5 MiB	2.5 MiB	2.6 MiB
2022_06_05	15,855	78,577	4.96	51.23	107.57	37.96	-0.18	0.03	9	0.99	Directed	Unipartite	pubkey alias rgb_color features addresses timestamp city region country postal timezone org latitude longitude	scid features fee_base_msat fee_proportional_millionths htlc_minimum_msat htlc_maximum_msat cltv_expiry_delta timestamp	2.4 MiB	3.0 MiB	3.0 MiB	3.1 MiB
2023_07_16	15,100	64,212	4.25	46.40	98.27	17.60	-0.21	0.03	9	1.00	Directed	Unipartite	pubkey alias rgb_color features addresses timestamp city region country postal timezone org latitude longitude	scid features fee_base_msat fee_proportional_millionths htlc_minimum_msat htlc_maximum_msat cltv_expiry_delta timestamp	2.2 MiB	2.7 MiB	2.7 MiB	2.8 MiB

Ridiculograms^*

^* These are automatically generated force-directed visualizations, and can be quite meaningless for networks both big and small. They should not be taken seriously as sources of scientific insight. See here for a discussion.