What the Data Reveals

Our dataset captures a snapshot of Lightning Network gossip propagation from a single observer connected to ~978 peers, recording over 416,000 unique gossip messages.

By the Numbers

Propagation Speed

Most gossip messages reach the majority of peers within a few seconds. However, the distribution has a long tail — some peers consistently receive messages many seconds after the first arrival.

The time_spread_ms for a typical message (the time between the first and last peer receiving it) ranges from under 1 second to over 10 seconds.

Fast vs Slow Peers

Peers cluster into roughly two groups:

• Fast peers (low avg_arrival_pct): These tend to be well-known routing nodes with high connectivity — they sit close to the center of the propagation replay
• Slow peers (high avg_arrival_pct): Often smaller nodes, Tor-only nodes, or peers with rate-limited gossip forwarding

Community Patterns

The manual community assignments (based on ~15 known hub pubkeys and alias matching) account for only 8 of 978 peers. The vast majority (970) fall into the “unknown” community. This highlights how much of the network remains uncharacterized — and how much room there is for better automated community detection.

Key Observations

• First responders are not random: A small set of peers consistently delivers messages first, suggesting they may be message originators or have particularly fast connections to the observer
• Geographic proximity ≠ propagation speed: Peers in the same city don’t necessarily receive messages at the same time — network topology dominates physical distance
• Implementation fingerprints are visible: Feature bits advertised in node_announcement messages differ across LN implementations, making it possible to identify which software a peer is running

🔗 Explore the data yourself at prototype-ln-gossip.vercel.app