How much volume of transactions did Lightning have for those services last month, compared to its onchain counterpart? Are Lightning transactions increasing, month by month, giving more reason behind the utility of the Lightning Network? Or decreasing, giving reason to debate if the developers are just wasting their time or not?
the volume on lightning is not a public metric
Yeah, we'll never get a truly accurate sense of volume, just because of the levels of privacy inherent in Lightning. Individual services can publish their own statistics if they choose to (but then we're reliant on the accuracy and honesty of those services). Capacity is a
slightly more accurate metric to report, but we can still only use that to guess the overall amount of activity happening.
OK, but can anyone in this topic assume that actual utility in the Lightning Network for users’ regular transactions is increasing? What is Bitcoin used mostly for? Sending to exchanges for trading, gambling, buying illegal drugs in the dark markets.