Not surprising at all. Despite all the critics only highlighting the decrease in liquidity, the Lightning ecosystem is growing stronger ever single day. I'm pretty sure that the critics are either nocoiners trying to trash talk Bitcoin, or the altcoin camps that worry about their projects because you can't compete with Bitcoin anymore in terms of speed and cost.

Benefit of the price going down is that it will make people focus back on development and whatnot, so I expect more liquidity to flow into Lightning in the forthcoming months. Another aspect is that merchants have less incentive to cash out to the mainchain, which means less outflow of existing liquidity and more inflow of new liquidity.

there is an indirect measure of Lightning use: liquidity. The liquidity should represent a slightly overoptimistic/speculative assessment of demand for Lightning transactions.

And it's fallen a little. But it will also not be a good indicator for much longer; once Lightning grows more, it will eventually become too large for every node to maintain a complete map of all the channels. At that point, if someone publishes figures about Lightning liquidity, the choice is either to believe what they say, or set up your own Lightning node that's configured to query+maintain the entire channel map.

And if you're thinking "just query the blockchain for the number of Lightning contracts", that won't work once taproot is used to write the script for Lightning contracts

Taproot+Schnorr are currently bundled together in 1 proposal. It's still in the mailing-list RFC ("request for comment") stage. Code is ready, but that's implementing the draft spec. There was a change to the spec agreed just recently, to give you an idea. Also, that's the actual cryptography code, plumbing that into the consensus stuff, the wallet code, and writing the activation logic are all yet to be completed. But the crpytographic stuff is the parts that need most scrutiny, so this way round is best.

I think the idea is to avoid the activation controversy this time, it's better to maintain stability, or at least public/market perception of it. How that's done exactly is unconfirmed, flag day activation I expect.


optimistic would be code inclusion in the Winter 2020 release (version 0.21.1), then activation flag day set 6 months out from that

Bottom line: possibly Schnorr+Taproot ready to use in June/July 2021. I hope that turns out to be conservative tbh.