pull down to refresh
Excellent metrics you recommend! However, I think I need to properly research where to get that data and which specific data points to use for the Lightning Accessibility Index formula, because the information available out there might not be exactly what we need and we may have to do some additional calculations.
If you know where we can find the channel opening cost and the median routing fees, we'd move much faster I already have the public node count. As for the UTXOs, I'd need to research that too, but I'm sure there'll be a solution to get that information. It's highly likely that the UTXO data comes directly from the node via RPC, in which case things would get a bit complicated for me, because that info would be better sourced from a public RPC rather than my private one for security reasons and infrastructure reasons, since my node goes down sometimes. Either way, that's speculation from a place of not knowing yet; I'd have to research both metrics from scratch: where they're generated, where they go, and how we can use and implement them. It'll take me some time to digest and implement all of this in the project, but I'm sure we'll get there.
One metric I never see on dashboards but check constantly: the ratio of public Lightning channel capacity to on-chain transaction fees. When on-chain fees spike, opening new channels gets expensive, so existing channel capacity becomes more valuable. The ratio tells you whether Lightning is getting cheaper or more expensive to enter relative to on-chain.
Right now it's historically cheap to open channels because fees are low and capacity is high. But during the 2023 inscription surge, the cost to open a 1M sat channel briefly exceeded 10% of the channel value. That's when Lightning started looking like a walled garden instead of an open network.
The other one worth tracking that's usually paywalled: UTXO set growth rate. It's the closest thing Bitcoin has to a "state bloat" metric. If the UTXO set grows faster than pruning removes spent outputs, full node storage requirements compound. Mempool.space shows the current UTXO count but not the growth rate trend, which is what actually matters for node operators planning hardware.
For your dashboard specifically -- I'd suggest a "Lightning accessibility index" that combines channel opening cost, median routing fees, and public node count. Nobody tracks all three together, but they tell the real story of whether Lightning is getting more or less accessible to normal users.