The revelation by Miles Suter, Product Lead at Block, at the Bitcoin Conference 2025 confirms the economic potential of LN for professional operators, but the yield comes mainly from routing fees
During the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas, Miles Suter, Bitcoin Product Lead at Block Inc., revealed data that could change the economic perception of the Lightning Network: the company’s routing node is generating annual returns of 9.7% on invested liquidity.
During his presentation, Suter confirmed what many experts suspected but no one had ever quantified precisely: Lightning payment routing can be not only technically effective, but also economically profitable on a large scale. With an estimated public capacity of 184 BTC (approximately $20 million), Block is demonstrating that Lightning infrastructure can generate significant returns through the use of bitcoin as a payment method.
Non-custodial yield, with a doubt
Lightning routing represents what experts define as “true non-custodial yield” – returns generated from the pure economic utility of bitcoin as a means of payment, without having to entrust one’s funds to third parties.
“We are earning almost 10% returns on Bitcoin by effectively routing real payments on the Lightning network,” Suter declared.
Riccardo Masutti — researcher and founder of Baited — has, however, observed that the double-digit yields advertised by Block are closely tied to an exceptionally aggressive fee structure that markedly deviates from the median parameters of the Lightning Network. In particular, the Cash App nodes apply a fee rate of 2,147,483,647 ppm, resulting in fees up to 2 million times higher than the average cost of standard channel transactions. Block’s own node also enforces significant fees: to route a million satoshis, it requires 1,053 sats in outgoing fees and 2,955 sats in incoming fees, compared to a network median base fee of approximately 0.999839 sat and a median fee rate of 0.000063 sat/sat. This discrepancy suggests that the yield is generated more by a surcharge imposed on intermediated payments than by any real efficiency in liquidity allocation.
In 2024 Cash App recorded an increase in Lightning payment volume equal to 7 times that of the previous year: one in four outgoing payments now occurs via LN, Suter stated.
According to Block’s Product Lead “if Bitcoin becomes only digital gold, we have failed the mission. If we don’t use bitcoin for payments, we risk losing one of the most important promises permissionless money. If we don’t preserve the qualities of cash in the digital world, human liberty is seriously in trouble.”
The company aims to incentivize practical and daily use of bitcoin, seeing Lightning payments as the key to realizing Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision of a “peer-to-peer electronic payment system.”
