Counting the top ten important developments of Bitcoin in 2022

Price crashes and cryptocurrency crashes dominated the headlines in 2022, but it can still be argued that 2022 was also a year of major progress for Bitcoin.

In 2022, we see Bitcoin as a protocol enabling a wide range of innovation, satisfying any needs identified by developers and entrepreneurs without requiring any changes to the protocol.

We have listed 10 important developments in Bitcoin in 2022. As the year is coming to an end, let’s take a look at the specific aspects.

1. Another year of 100% uptime

Bitcoin's biggest achievement this year remains Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin continues to operate perfectly, with a block appearing approximately every 10 minutes and its token issuance fully in line with the provisions of Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 white paper. There have been no emergency reboots, no hard forks, no chain splits, no protocol-level hacks or vulnerabilities. Yet, in the face of everything in 2022, Bitcoin once again provides 100% uptime and is available to anyone in the world all year round. Billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin are transferred on its blockchain every day.

Bitcoin has done all of this without any foundation backing it, any direct employees, or any leaders or venture capitalists. As a result, ongoing development that relies on Bitcoin’s reliability and predictability has been able to proceed intensively without interruption for another year, and with confidence that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Notably, none of the remaining projects on this list would require any changes to Bitcoin’s base-layer consensus rules.

2. Development of Lightning Network

While Bitcoin's base layer remains stable, its most important scaling protocol, the Lightning Network, has experienced massive growth and development in 2022. The Lightning Network enables instant, cheap off-chain payments, eliminating the need to wait for blocks to confirm transactions. It is fully decentralized and permissionless, improving Bitcoin's scalability while still leveraging the security and settlement guarantees of Bitcoin's base layer. In 2022, the network's publicly visible liquidity capacity rose from 1,058 BTC to over 4,771 BTC.

The number of Lightning Network channels grew 80%, from 37,298 to 67,339.

The number of publicly visible Lightning Network nodes increased by +88%, from 8,295 nodes to 15,636 (although the rate of growth slowed in the second half of the year).

All in all, the growth of the Lightning Network this year has been astounding, driven by the launch of numerous wallets, better tools built for users, and more educational resources. Instant, cheap payments (often less than a cent) became common in 2022 as Bitcoin users looked to exchange value peer-to-peer over the Lightning Network.

3. El Salvador

In 2022, El Salvador has undergone the greatest national reinvention in history under President Nayib Bukele’s policies of economic freedom and Bitcoin. Bukele, who appeared on the cover of Bitcoin Magazine’s year-end edition, was the first pioneer and leader to dare to embrace pure Bitcoin and the economic freedom it offers to its people.

In the column, Bukele called on Bitcoin users around the world to realize that El Salvador’s fight against the global elite is also their fight. El Salvador’s embrace of the Bitcoin currency shows everyone that, despite the mainstream media’s misgivings, it understands exactly what a revolutionary currency actually is. While U.S. regulators and political elites were being duped by the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried, Bitcoin was bringing prosperity to El Salvador. Its tourism numbers were surging, its GDP was growing, and the country was adding satellites.

In October, El Salvador established the world’s first “Bitcoin Embassy” in Lugano. The chamber will be led by Josue Lopez, a Salvadoran Bitcoin miner and investor, Bitcoin diplomat and “honorary consul.” In November, the Bitcoin Office was established within the Office of the President of El Salvador. The office was established to meet the growing demand for access to information from global investors. The Bitcoin Office further establishes the Salvadoran template for more countries on the path to hyperbitcoinization to replicate. El Salvador ended the year in the most Bitcoin way possible — President Bukele announced that El Salvador would begin purchasing one Bitcoin per day.

4. Machankura — Bitcoin transactions via text in Africa

The new service was coded in a few weeks by African developer Kgothatso Ngako, who noticed a problem — most Africans have basic mobile phones but no reliable internet connection — so he created a solution. Machankura enables Africans to receive and spend Bitcoin via text messages, without the need for an internet connection.

According to a report by Caribou, 94% of financial transactions in Africa are conducted via text messages, while only 6% are conducted via mobile apps. This new service allows individuals across Africa to use Bitcoin for the first time on technology they already have at their fingertips. Projects like Machankura will help drive Bitcoin adoption in regions that need the digital currency most.

5. Taro — Assets on the Lightning Network

This year, Lightning Labs proposed a protocol to Bitcoin and the Lightning Network that aims to allow assets to be minted, sent, and received on the network. By leveraging Bitcoin's latest protocol upgrade, Taproot, Taro can theoretically issue any type of asset on the Bitcoin blockchain while still using the immutable verification of Bitcoin's proof-of-work consensus mechanism. Taro can allow the issuance of a variety of assets such as stablecoins, stocks, and bonds on top of the Bitcoin protocol, opening the door to more use cases and more functionality on the network.

6. Impervious.ai — The first P2P Lightning-native browser

Impervious Technologies has released the first web browser based on the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s second-layer extension system. It is a peer-to-peer web browser that provides a full set of communication, data transfer, and lightning payment tools without any middleman.

This manifests itself in secure peer-to-peer messaging, P2P video calls, P2P workspaces, decentralized identity management, decentralized data storage, and direct monetization of users’ data. All of these tools are fully encrypted, and they eliminate centralized intermediaries that collect and sell user data. By leveraging the decentralized nature of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, Impervious Technologies gives us a hint of what the future of the Internet will look like.

7. FediMints – Collaborative Hosting

FediMint is a new approach to Bitcoin custody that helps secure each other's Bitcoin and privacy by forming collaborative custody communities. This form of custody leverages the inherent fact that humans trust those closest to them. It leverages technologies like the Federation and (David) Chaumian e-cash mint to cryptographically maintain privacy between individuals in a group while allowing them to share custody of Bitcoin for the entire group. This custody solution offers the potential to scale Bitcoin, improve privacy, reduce on-chain fees, and enable more individuals to self-custody Bitcoin globally.

8. Value-4-Value — Embed Payments Everywhere

Value-4-Value is a new approach to content distribution where creators receive value after “customers” enjoy their content via the Lightning Network. Over 10,000 content creators have already implemented Value-4-Value on their podcasts, and solutions like LightningAddresses and Bolt-12 invoicing are making this possible for all other types of content, and are expected to continue to grow rapidly in 2023.

9. Plebnet Lightning — Community tools that make Lightning more powerful

This informal Telegram group of regular people interested in running their own Lightning nodes is on its way to over 5,800 members.

Not only do participants support each other on best practices, community members have developed and released a large number of open source applications that make it easy for anyone to access some of the most advanced features of the Lightning Network. sdLightning Terminal is a browser-based interface for managing channel liquidity on self-hosted Lightning nodes, performing submarine swaps through the Lightning Loop service, categorizing channels and integrating loopd, poold, and faraday daemons. Bitcoin Balance makes it easy to balance channels, making it easy to issue Lightning transactions to balance the inflow and outflow of liquidity in a channel. LNDg and Lightning Jet provide similar functionality with more advanced features for monitoring nodes and maximizing efficiency.

10. Gridless computing with BTC mining

People around the world live with little, expensive, or no electricity. Bitcoin mining is changing all that. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey shared an example of how he protected the Bitcoin network with excess hydroelectric power while powering a rural village in Kenya, while reducing the electricity bill for 2,000 people (500 households) from about $10 per month to just $4.

This is far from an isolated example, as another $2 million round led by Stillmark VC and Block in December will be used to leverage Bitcoin mining to increase energy supply across Africa while further decentralizing and securing the Bitcoin network.