In a Thursday speech, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul S. Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize the country’s securities rules and regulations to move financial markets on-chain.
“Under my leadership, the SEC will not stand idly by and watch innovations develop overseas while our capital markets remain stagnant,” he said at an America First Policy Institute event in Washington D.C. His plan includes measures to reshore crypto businesses that have left the country and to ensure that “archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”
I was specifically speaking in USD terms, take a look at the page I linked above. It has graphs with both USD and Bitcoin on them. In Bitcoin terms Lightning’s capacity peaked in early 2023. In dollar terms it was December 2024. The line is squiggly and has a general long-term upward trend overall on the net dollar capacity, but it really doesn’t look very impressive compared to Ethereum’s layer-2 architecture. And that’s the only line where I see a long-term rise, the rest have been stagnant or declining for years.
I stand by my overall view that Bitcoin’s technology is simply obsolete. It doesn’t do anything, it just sits there being valuable because it’s valuable. I don’t think that’s going to endure forever.