Nodes rise because businesses that want to build on the chains require them unless they want to a pay far too much for a wrapper API. The number of wallets is literally unbounded, and it’s impossible to know precisely how many entities are attached to those wallets. I am one person. My tens of wallets are only for one person. I make a new wallet every time I try new wallet apps. I make new wallets to try new things. “Number of wallets” and “number of nodes” is a bad metric.

I would be highly interested in finding a serious shop/commerce/ecommerc operation where Lighting Network is actually used.

I check LN every 6 months or so and situation is not looking so great.

As it was with Bitcoin itself in early 2010s the shops advertising crypto acceptance are doing it mostly for publicity/ideological reasons or actually have stopped existing.

So I check: https://acceptlightning.com/map.html

Random selection:

* http://paraeasy.ch/joomla/ - Adobe Flash Player not supported ...

* https://www.kaeserei-lustnau.ch - unclear if the shop actually takes any payments

* https://shop.energy-kitchen.ch/#/shop - application not taking requests at this endpoint

* http://www.room77.de/ - SMTP-packets to port 25 (info[at]room77.de) may very likely get a response just as much as electrons sent to our telephoney landline-device (+49.30.31102260). Single static page.

* https://acceptlightning.com/rummels-acoustics.com - standard Bootstrap page - page not found

Finally I find - https://www.livingroomofsatoshi.com/graphs This looks like a serious operation - and lighting network is used quite a bit for smaller transactions.

Unfortunately, this is something that would be of interest only to someone who already owns BTC or some other crypto.

If you are Joe Sixpack you have very little reason to pay with crypto because it will be more expensive than paying with Visa/MC/Paypal etc.

So where are the successful use cases that utilize Lighting Network?

Lightning network pulls transactions off-chain, thus relying on trusting someone (either the person you transact with or some third party acting as escrow for the funds). By adding in trust, you can mitigate the primary bottleneck caused by proof-of-work consensus methods. But if you have people you can trust to transact with, there's no point in interfacing with Bitcoin at all, just make a micro-payment network without the bitcoin connectivity, like Venmo. This is why we don't see adoption of Lightning Network, it just moves us off of Bitcoin, which lets us get most of the "benefits" for none of the costs.