LiteSpark, the Bitcoin Lightning Community startup based by former Meta govt David Marcus, who oversaw the event of Meta’s Libra token, is pushing the concept of utilizing BTC for on a regular basis funds quite than long-term holdings.
In an announcement on Wednesday, February 18, LightSpark introduced that it has partnered with Cross River Financial institution, a crypto-friendly, FDIC-insured financial institution, to help 24/7 settlement of Bitcoin community transactions by way of the U.S. banking system.
Cross River has change into a serious banking companion for U.S. crypto corporations, offering banking companies to corporations comparable to Circle and Coinbase, notably throughout applications associated to playing cards and stablecoins.
Underneath the settlement, Lightspark will course of transactions over the Lightning Community and Cross River will settle fiat currencies by way of quicker fee methods comparable to FedNow. In keeping with the announcement, the partnership targets B2B, cross-border flows, and retail flows, the place prompt funds revolutionize money administration.
Utilization exceeds TVL
The Lightning Community has had a powerful however spotty efficiency to date. Though complete community capability rose to new highs in late 2025 after which declined barely in mid-February of this yr, the whole quantity locked was near $338 million, in keeping with DefiLlama knowledge, a determine possible influenced by the current Bitcoin value decline.
Regardless of the comparatively low TVL in comparison with Ethereum Layer 2, the community processed an estimated quantity of $1.17 billion throughout greater than 5.2 million transactions in November 2025 alone, with a mean Lightning switch of round $223, in keeping with knowledge cited by Sam Wouters, advertising director at Bitcoin infrastructure firm River.
Nonetheless, Wouters famous that at present “the most typical use case for Lightning transactions is sending cash to and from exchanges,” highlighting how far the community nonetheless has to go as a retail funds rail.
Lightning community statistics. Supply: Mempool.house
On the similar time, Mempoolspace knowledge reveals that infrastructure is changing into extra concentrated, with greater than 40% of Lightning nodes hosted by simply two suppliers: Amazon and Google Cloud, and Amazon alone accounting for greater than 1 / 4 of the community’s node energy.
