Share this article
Square Flies the Flag for the Lightning Network With 9.7% Yield on Bitcoin Holdings
Block's Miles Suter said that the firm is earning "real BTC returns from our corporate holdings...by efficiently routing real payments across Lightning"
May 29, 2025, 2:28 p.m.
What to know:
- Square is earning a yield of 9.7% on its bitcoin holdings through running a node on the Lightning network.
- The yield is earned through Square's Lightning service provider c=, which was created two years ago to improve liquidity and efficiency on Lightning.
- Often heralded as the grest hope for increased Bitcoin's scale and speed, the Lightning Network progress seems to have stalled in recent years.
Square, the payment platform owned by Jack Dorsey's company Block (XYZ) is earning a yield of 9.7% on its bitcoin holdings through running a node on the Lightning network.
Block's Bitcoin product lead Miles Suter said that the firm is earning "real bitcoin returns from our corporate holdings...by efficiently routing real payments across the Lightning network," in an appearance at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
The yield is earned through Square's Lightning service provider c=, which was created two years ago to improve liquidity and efficiency on Lightning.
Lightning Labs' Ryan Gentry referred to Suter's announcement as "the biggest news" at Bitcoin 2025 in a post on X, estimating that Square's 9.7% yield equates to around $1 million a year.
For many years, bitcoin layer-2 network Lightning was hailed as the savior to BTC's problems of scale and speed by creating micropayment channels that can process transactions away from the main blockchain.
Over time though some of these hopes have faded owing to Lightning's faults, such as the requirement for inbound liquidity, whereby users must in effect commit BTC in order to receive BTC. This may deter adoption by smaller-scale nodes, which is a hindrance to decentralization.
However, Square sees the layer-2 as fundamental to its plans to accelerate BTC payments adoption, with one in four of its outbound bitcoin payments now processed on Lightning, Suter said onstage in Las Vegas.
The company is piloting Lightning-based payments at Bitcoin 2025 with plans for a rollout to all eligible Square sellers in 2026.
"When you enable real payments by making the. faster and more convenient, the network gets stronger, smarter and more useful," Suter said.
"So if you're wondering if wondering if bitcoin is still just an asset, the answer is no. It's already an asset and a protocol and now Block is leading the effort to make it the world's best payment system."
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Solana’s Drift Launches v3, With 10x Faster Trades
With v3, the team says that about 85% of market orders will fill in under half a second, and liquidity will deepen enough to bring slippage on larger trades down to around 0.02%.
What to know:
- Drift, one of the largest perpetuals trading platforms on Solana, has launched Drift v3, a major upgrade meant to make on-chain trading feel as fast and smooth as using a centralized exchange.
- The new version will deliver 10-times faster trade execution thanks to a rebuilt backend, marking the largest performance jump the project has made so far.
Top Stories
