Sam Wouters from River shares the latest insights on Bitcoin and Lightning Network adoption, highlighting recent data, growth trends, and misconceptions. Stephan and Sam also discover how Lightning is scaling, the role of institutional and business adoption, and effective strategies for individual investors.
Takeaways:
🔸Lightning Network transaction volume and capacity
🔸Growth and efficiency improvements in Lightning routing
🔸Misconceptions about Lightning Network scalability
🔸Institutional and business adoption of Bitcoin
🔸Behavior patterns of individual Bitcoin investors
🔸Narratives and misconceptions in Bitcoin adoption
🔸Impact of institutional buying and selling on Bitcoin price
🔸Strategies for Bitcoin evangelism and education
Timestamps:
(00:00) – Intro
(00:45) – Overview of River’s report on Lightning Network growth
(03:31) – Public Lightning Network capacity & usage
(09:14) – Lightning Network user insights & transaction patterns
(13:25) – Misconceptions among Bitcoiners about Lightning adoption
(20:29) – Centralization in Lightning Network
(23:27) – OGs selling Bitcoin
(28:21) – Growing institutional adoption of Bitcoin
(32:33) – Businesses adopting Bitcoin
(38:47) – Individual Bitcoin investment patterns
(41:19) – The importance of DCA in bear markets
(44:38) – Bitcoin evangelism
(52:22) – Closing thoughts
Links:
Stephan Livera links:
- Follow me on X: @stephanlivera
- Subscribe to the podcast
- Subscribe to Substack
Transcript:
Stephan Livera (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Today I’m joined by Sam Wouters from River. Many of you will know River as a Bitcoin only brokerage, financial services, various products that they’re offering known for doing lightning stuff as well.
And I know you guys are just going to be putting out this report soon on Bitcoin adoption and interestingly for me especially as the lightning adoption stuff So, you know, welcome to show Sam and yeah, just give us a bit of a an overview and what you what you saw in this report
Sam Wouters (00:31)
Yeah, thanks for having me on Stephan.
So with the report, like this is something we’ve been doing for the last couple of years. And one of the goals has been to make something that is very hard to understand and kind of map out more understandable for people. So everyone is familiar typically, or I’m saying everyone, but a lot of people probably aren’t familiar with sort of like how much capacity is in the Lightning Network, how many channels there are, sort of like how long it’s been around, which has been almost 10 years now since it was first conceived.
And what people struggle with is really understanding how much is it actually being used? Are people using Lightning on a day-to-day basis? What are they using it for? How often? How big are those transactions?
beyond individuals running their own Lightning nodes, there just isn’t that much clarity on the developments there. And that makes it really hard for people to understand like is sort of like, is Bitcoin scaling? Like does this technology work? Who is adopting it? Like what is it being used for? And it makes things like capital allocation in the space really difficult because investors just don’t know like, you know, if I’m investing in a Lightning company, is there actual demand in the market there other than like the public
that I can tell that typically don’t move drastically over time. So it’s quite difficult for them to make informed decisions without more information. And then for people choosing to dedicate their career to improving lightning as well, it’s like, who am I doing it for? I can’t really see who’s using it or like how active that is, other than my own node that I’m running and the activity that’s happening there. So the data just like helps to inform a whole variety of different stakeholders also.
even like exchanges, should we adopt Lightning, should we offer that to our clients or not. If they don’t know how many people really need it and their clients aren’t at large scale reaching out to them, asking them to add it, then they don’t really know. So lots of different categories there that, you know, get better informed through better data.
Stephan Livera (02:25)
Yeah.
Sam Wouters (02:26)
And then we kind of made the decision a couple of years back, like at River, we have our own lightning data. Obviously there’s other people in the space that also have lightning data. What if we just do an exercise once a year where we try to collect as much as possible and then get a bit of an indication that way of like how much traffic could roughly be happening on the network. So all of this is obviously, you know, it’s by no means perfect.
And a big reason for that as well is because we’re only using public data and the Lightning Network can also be used privately in the sense of private channels where the participants just aren’t publicly known and we don’t have any data on that either. So this is in that regard is like a lower bound estimate as well and the reality could still be significantly higher.
Stephan Livera (03:10)
Right, so yeah, let’s talk about the high level numbers, because I think that will be interesting for people. So give us the headline stats on Lightning Network nowadays.
Sam Wouters (03:16)
Yeah.
Yeah, so what we found was we did this exercise for November 2025. It takes like a while to gather all the data and process everything. And in that month, we found like we basically collected data on about 50 % of all the capacity on the network. So that’s quite a lot. With that said, the year before we did about 80 % and the year before that was also around 50%. So it’s kind of fluctuated based on like, who’s willing to participate, how much are we able to gather? Where’s all the capacity low?
and what not. But we use that roughly 50 % to then determine like you kind of want to avoid how much overlap is there between these notes.
and to then arrive at like roughly how much volume has flown through and how many transactions have flown through that 50 % of the capacity and then extrapolate that to the rest of the network to get like a rough estimate of sort of like directionally order of magnitude how much is going on. So what we found there was that in November 2025 we went over a billion dollars in transaction volume on Lightning. I think the final number was 1.17 billion that we found compared to the year before 2024.
Stephan Livera (04:31)
Yeah, and that’s per month, right? What you’re saying?
Sam Wouters (04:31)
we found 286.
That’s indeed in the month of November. And then a year earlier in November 2024, it was about 286 million dollars. So that’s a really significant increase. Like it’s a forex increase basically, which was very like pretty shocking to find. That’s a very rapid increase and people are especially surprised, I think, because the Bitcoin price has been relatively like sideways and now down in recent months. But back in November, it was like an average for a year.
So the questions start flowing in from people like hey is this a strange outlier of some kind? Like did you guys check?
more data throughout the year, like did someone cook the books or whatever. And we had partial, we have our own data, obviously a river, but we also had partial data from some other data providers for December. And then just confirmed the trend of anything that was stronger sort of like directionally based on that data. But that wasn’t enough to say like, okay, we’re going to put an estimate for December into as the assumptions just get weaker when you have less capacity supporting it. So that was kind of the thinking there.
Stephan Livera (05:34)
Interesting. Yeah now I guess
some interesting context as you said What we’re talking about here is the public lightning network now people look at explorers Whether that’s emboss or mempool.space lightning and I can see here It’s five thousand three hundred and forty eight BTC is the quote-unquote TVL of lightning But your number that you gave which is one point one seven billion is something like seventeen thousand BTC per month So in other words, it means it’s cycling over more than 3x every month
Sam Wouters (05:42)
Yes.
Stephan Livera (06:04)
Right, so there’s kind of a funny like the stock value of, you know, at least public Bitcoin in lightning channels is, 5000. But we’ve got 17,000 BTC, kind of just assuming current prices. It’s kind of crazy that it’s we’re getting like 3x turnover every month.
Sam Wouters (06:04)
Yup.
Yep, yeah, it’s fantastic to see. An analogy I like to use here, because like one of the first pieces of criticism you get from people is like, no, it’s not scaling or this can be possible because the public metrics don’t reflect this kind of growth.
And we’d already started calling it out a couple of years ago, is like we’re seeing an increase in how efficient people are with the capacity that’s on the network. And we realized this ourselves as well. Like you don’t need to have hundreds of Bitcoin sitting in nodes on the network to be able to like route a lot of payments. Like as long as your setup is efficient, you’ve got like good loops to be able to refill your capacity and whatnot. Then like there isn’t really a strong need there to just keep like
adding on more and more capacity that’s ultimately just sitting in essentially all the wallet which puts it at more risk than if it were in cold storage. And if you think about it, like a lot of this growth here makes a lot of sense because there have been a lot of improvements that have made it more sort of like made it easier for node operators to manage their liquidity. Everyone’s just gotten better and the analogy I like to use is like think of it as like a game of tennis where instead of telling the players like you should be scoring
as
many points as possible so the balls constantly go off the court and you need to like pick up a new ball like new liquidity basically and you keep trying to score as many points as possible a lot of people kind of look at lightning like that they don’t really understand like wait like shouldn’t we be maximizing the amount of bitcoin that’s in the lightning network and like having more channels and having more nodes and it’s all about every number going up all the time whereas i think what’s happened a lot is basically we’ve told the players in
the the longer you keep playing with the same ball, the more you can bounce it back and forth without dropping it, the more money you make. So try not to hit any balls off the field, like maximize the sort of like the balls that you have available to you. Typically these players will have a couple in their pocket on the field and just keep going back and forth as many times as you can. The more times you can, the faster you play, the more money you make, but just don’t hit it off the court. And that’s what we’ve seen, like Lightning Note operators get better and better at over the past years.
Stephan Livera (08:32)
Yeah, and this aligns with other lightning experts that I’ve talked to that generally speaking when I talk to them as in practitioners who are actually running a node and actually doing this professionally or semi professionally they are noticing this kind of secular increase in lightning volumes just over time right now Okay, of course when there’s like a big bull run in the Bitcoin price Okay, maybe you get a spike maybe as a quote-unquote wealth effect, right? Historically that has been kind of a factor, but I’m curious. Did you see a similar?
pattern there and then do you have any insights or any analysis on the number of users of lightning?
Sam Wouters (09:09)
On the number of users, we don’t. It’s not an area that we were looking into now. I recall trying to create estimates in one of the reports a couple years ago and it’s incredibly difficult. You can look at rough downloads of wallets and things like that, but there’s obviously a lot of churn there where people don’t keep using it. You can make estimations based on an exchange, might have lightning available.
and then trying to estimate, they have this many active users, only a few of them publicly report that, how many of those might be using Lightning? It’s all like too, sort of like the estimations are a bit too weak there to make a proper estimation, especially at this point with how many large platforms have it available, that is really difficult to determine like roughly what is that. What we do know, that gives a bit of a, honestly, it gives the best kind of estimation of how many users might there be, is how many
transactions were sent in a particular month by the estimation. Like when we go back to November 2025 there, mentioned earlier over a billion dollar in transaction volume and the Lightning transaction count was 5.22 million by our estimation. So basically like 2.6 million that we could directly confirm and then sort of extrapolating that out into the network.
Stephan Livera (10:23)
Yeah.
Sam Wouters (10:23)
would be
publicly around 5.2 million. So that tells you roughly like, you know, like how many users could that be? It’s not going to be a hundred million users. It’s probably also not going to be 10 million users. It could be that there are more users and half of them weren’t active in that month. That’s, you know, that’s obviously possible. And then you get into the discussion of like, when is someone a user? Is it if they transact once a month? Is it like once a quarter? Is it every week?
Stephan Livera (10:27)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sam Wouters (10:51)
That gets really tricky to discuss as well. But like the…
Stephan Livera (10:53)
Any insights on the
average size of the transaction? I believe that’s been rising over time also.
Sam Wouters (10:59)
Yeah, it’s been rising and I think the logical conclusion there is and kind of like a lot of people have gotten back to me as this kind of gotcha of like, yeah, the primary reason people are doing these lightning transactions now is like withdrawing from an exchange, for example, or maybe sending from one exchange to the other, probably for like arbitrage reasons or something like that.
But the reason that’s logically happening is the vast majority of people today treat their exchange as their wallet. Most Bitcoiners, by volume, most Bitcoin is held in self-custody. But by count of individuals and where they’re storing their Bitcoin, a lot of people prefer to use exchanges because they’re scared of self-custody for whatever reasons. And it’s a much slower progress to get them into self-custody. So naturally, if so much of the Bitcoin and so many of the individuals treat an exchange as their…
central place from which they hold their money and might do transactions, then that is logically where a lot of the lightning volume also emerges from. Like, I don’t know how people picture this would be any kind of, like, any different.
you for all of the money that you pull from an exchange and put into a self custodial lightning wallet as well. Like you then need to transact quite a lot before you start matching that volume that you withdrew from the exchange there. So especially in the sort of like earlier developmental stages of lightning, it’s very logical that a lot of the volume lives around exchanges. And people come back to me with this like, but if you extract that volume that what’s left and it’s like, well, that’s like saying, we should only be counting cash transactions or something because any
you would draw from a bank ATM. That’s not allowed and it’s like, you know, I understand the arguments for that but it gets so opinionated as well about what is valid volume and what isn’t and our goal with this research, also with the five million transaction count, it isn’t to say like this was a real transaction but we think that one wasn’t because it’s all just like, you know, it’s like data strings. There’s no like…
Stephan Livera (12:29)
Right, and not ATM withdrawals or something like…
Yeah.
Sam Wouters (12:53)
clarity around what was the intent of a person to go send out this transaction or this tool, you know, they did a thousand transactions there in an hour. There’s no way a human did that. So what was the exact use case here? Let’s categorize that differently. Like there’s no way of ⁓ doing that at scale.
Stephan Livera (13:07)
Yeah, gotcha.
Yeah, if you were to look back to, let’s say, popular narratives when lightning was early, what would you say we as Bitcoin and lightning, know, enthusiasts, know, adopters, what were we getting wrong? What narratives were we get, what were we wrong about and what were we right about?
Sam Wouters (13:30)
Ooh, that’s a really good question. I think…
I think one big thing I was kind of touching on in there is like Bitcoiners have been like, we’re always very hopeful that everyone will become like a true Bitcoiner. You will hold Bitcoin in self-custody and cold storage and kind of go all the way into that trajectory of like you get into Austrian economics and you just like start questioning everything in your life. And while that’s like the ideal North Star for a lot of Bitcoiners, not necessarily everyone gets there. So when
Lightning was launched early on. I think a lot of people had this idea of like everyone’s going to do itself because they’re really and that’s where we start out and it’s only successful if everyone or like the vast majority of people do that and I think like you know I definitely I’m an idealist I see that North Star 2 at the same time I think that like that’s not how most people adopt
technology necessarily and a lot of people are very hesitant when it comes to money. So for us, it’s much more about like who is on the trajectory of going towards that end goal of like adopting Bitcoin in more self-sovereign ways. And even if they’re initially using it custodially, at least they’re like much closer to using it non-custodially than if they weren’t using it at all, if they weren’t using some kind of stable coin or some other way to do payments. So that’s the thing where I felt like in the early years,
of Bitcoiners were very focused on that. It’s like it can only be a successor for all doing it that way but I think like practice has kind of shown like a lot of people are happy to use it and benefit from it and the more they use it the more likely they’ll be open to using it in sort of like more self-sovereign ways as well. I think the second thing that’s that’s kind of stood out to me with with lightning compared to the early years is I think a lot of people were
like overly focused on capacity as well of like, we’ve got to get a lot of Bitcoin in here, lots of channels kind of already touched on that too. And then we learned much later on, like, wait, we don’t necessarily need as much money in there as possible. You know, like, let’s, let’s like use what we need essentially. And a lot of, you like other projects come in for all kinds of,
reasons into the comments to say like, look, this is like only so much total value locked compared to these other platforms. It’s like, well, they’re completely different. Like on one you’re staking and doing all kinds of DeFi things. And then the other, you’re trying to facilitate pigments. Like completely different use case. It doesn’t really make sense to compare. And I’m trying to think, I had a third in mind that’s been quite prominent, but it’s slipping my mind at the moment. Maybe it’ll come back.
Stephan Livera (16:00)
Yeah, gotcha.
Maybe another one would be this kind of everyone’s gonna run a node in their box at home sort of thing. Like that was a common, know, many of us believe that. I think you were kind of touching on that. Also, like I remember at the lightning conference in Berlin in October 2019, like I was, you know, connecting over tour to my node back home in Sydney at that time and making a lightning payment. And that was like, it felt so new and cool. But I would say nowadays it’s more just like people are just using like a phone app.
Sam Wouters (16:07)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yep. For sure. I’m remembering the third one now. Yeah, I’m remembering the third one now actually, which is…
Stephan Livera (16:28)
or a custodial platform and that’s kind of where most of them are at.
Sam Wouters (16:36)
I think when Lightning launched, remember very vividly, everyone was so fearful and so concerned about Bitcoin scalability. And my take on that’s been like, a lot of our concerns were very premature. If the system doesn’t scale to 8 billion people, then it has failed, has been like a predominant narrative in the space for many years. Like it’s decreased a bit over time because people have started realizing, wait, on-chain fees are actually really low, so it’s not as much of a concern.
I actually don’t think scalability is Bitcoin’s biggest sort of like challenge or issue today. I would love it if it was. That would be you know a big luxury problem in a way to have. On the other hand there would be a lot of pain and struggle with people trying to send transactions.
But practically today, you know, the on-chain fees don’t lie there low. So scalability isn’t as much of a concern as people have made it out to be. And part of the reason there is like, you know, it’s like gone in different directions. Like a lot of people, there was even the question the other day of like, wait, did you might’ve actually posted it? Like did Lightning scale too well? And yeah, exactly. Like did it scale too well? And did it draw too many transactions from the chain?
Stephan Livera (17:37)
Yeah, I posted this, I think.
Sam Wouters (17:45)
you know, the way exchanges are using also things like liquid and whatnot and all kinds of other ways to exchange value between them, taking that value off the main chain.
Like it’s not as much of a problem as we’d like it to be. Honestly, in my view, today’s biggest challenge for Bitcoin is actually its public image. A lot of people still pilot in with crypto and think it’s like, you know, they’ve put it, I tweeted this yesterday. think it’s like, people are putting like years ago, people put Bitcoin into a box and it’s the wrong box. Like sort of like in a box in their head, but it’s the wrong box. They think it’s the same thing as other cryptocurrencies. They think it’s a scam. think it can be trusted for whatever.
reason
they think it’s just like a speculative hype and they’re sticking with that belief and changing that belief is incredibly difficult and that is bitcoins like sort of like biggest hurdle to further growth and then if we manage to get more people going there again and excited about Bitcoin then inevitably we will bump into scalability I do believe that I’m by no means saying scalability solved it’s more like it’s not as big of a challenge as we initially thought it would be because we don’t need a billion people on there it’s like when you when you think
about it like airports can’t transfer a billion people at any instance either like airplanes and airports and all of the infrastructure that’s there it doesn’t mean that they’re not useful or that you know it’s not incredibly helpful technology to the entire planet like should we just give up on everything that doesn’t scale immediately to the entire planet it’s like no that doesn’t
sense. Cows also don’t scale globally, like they can’t graze everywhere, they can’t be taken all over the planet today, there’s just a lot of places where they wouldn’t thrive. So they can’t produce meat for everyone around the planet, not even everyone wants to eat meat. Doesn’t mean that, you know, very silly example, but doesn’t mean that cows don’t make sense, so we should just abandon eating those and doing anything with that.
That kind of logic, it’s like I saw this very much in the early years of Lightning where everyone kept pushing back and saying yeah but if not every single Bitcoin user can have their own Lightning channel and use this in a non-custodial way then it’s immediately failed and it’s like a very self-defeating approach where we’re letting good be the of like perfectly the enemy of good.
We can do a lot with this technology. I’m by no means someone who says this is going to be the solution for everyone and everything. But we are, you’re seeing it, people are using it regardless of those opinions and using it in very constructive ways for them. yeah, I think that’s been a really big evolution.
Stephan Livera (20:10)
Yeah, so it’s interesting. I’m
curious whether you see like from a lightning topology perspective, like that was another criticism leveled in the earlier days of like, it’s going to centralize. It’s going to be this kind of hub and spoke model. Is there a truth to that or not? Or how are you seeing that?
Sam Wouters (20:30)
I think to our point earlier of like it emerging primarily around exchanges, that is definitely a thing that happens.
There’s no, like we don’t have data on exactly like how much, you know, how much would be concentrated from like start to end of payments there. But I imagine it’s very high. So there is certainly a centralization. I also think that is logical in the early stages still. And the more payments start coming up as a use case and we’re seeing this with Square rolling this out to so many of their merchants. The more that starts becoming a thing, the more people will start using Bitcoin for payments for all kinds of use cases.
And the more that happens, the more I think it starts to decentralize over time, this competition starts coming up, more and more wallets start emerging and people just start educating themselves better on what else is possible with this technology. But if that early sort of network effect and eagerness to be using Lightning isn’t there, even though it’s not fully non-custodial yet and not fully decentralized,
across an entire network but there’s like a certain concentration then I also like I just don’t really see the path towards like growing in a more decentralized direction either like this is one of those like if you look at Bitcoin itself as well in the very early years there were only so many people running nodes around the world as well you know like I don’t have the numbers but it’s you know well initially people had to mine with it but you started out with a couple dozen
⁓ in the earliest months and probably grew to hundreds and thousands eventually. But it just takes a lot of time for the network to decentralize. And what we’re seeing today as well is like Bitcoin network itself has tens of thousands of nodes, but adoption of individuals keeps growing faster than new nodes are getting added to the network. Like the total population per node is essentially like those two things are tracking today. So you could argue the same thing for Bitcoin. It’s like it’s not decentralizing further.
And as a result, know, a lot of people are using it in custodial ways because they’re relying on someone else’s notes to…
Well, those two things are slightly different, but basically they’re trusting other parties for certain functions within holding Bitcoin. And it’s a very similar pattern. It’s like, should we start calling our Bitcoin there? It’s like not decentralizing further there either. When I think if you look at all the metrics, like Bitcoin is very decentralized. And what is perfect decentralization as well as, don’t want to get too philosophical there, but ⁓ I think like it’s a trajectory and
Stephan Livera (22:51)
Yeah. Yeah.
Sam Wouters (22:53)
I think the most important part to seeing like are people even willing to go down that path is like is there volume and activity and interest at all and if that isn’t there either then…
Stephan Livera (23:02)
Yeah, which I guess come back
to why you’re doing this report and you’re showing, hey, there’s growth at least on the lightning side. And then even just in terms of users, I know you, in some of the notes you sent, there’s also a growth in the like ownership or at least shifts in the ownership. And like, I guess that’s also been a big narrative recently. People talking about, know, the so-called IPO moment, this idea of, you know, all the OGs are selling and they’re rebalancing out of Bitcoin into other assets. And this has been kind
Sam Wouters (23:05)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stephan Livera (23:30)
of a very prevailing narrative. What are you finding and what’s your analysis been there?
Sam Wouters (23:36)
So a lot of people are obviously a lot of people are searching for like why has the price gone down because they hear about it, you know, all these institutions buying we just put out a visual yesterday of like 3000 institutions hold Bitcoin today. It’s something like 90 % of the top investment advisors like 60 % of the top hedge funds in the US like half the banks are building Bitcoin products. Like people hear all these messages to hear about Michael Saylor buying and strategy and you know, all of these.
thousands of companies that have been accumulating over the past years.
And it makes it so hard to fathom like why is the price going down despite all of that? And I think to your point of like OG selling is like that’s like what on-chain data tells us. It’s very hard to deny that those coins have been moving. And partially it will be like moving into gold doing well, AI being a very attractive area that a lot of people have been very interested in over the past year. That obviously plays a big role as well. There’s been another flashy thing coming up, which is
Like the same thing we saw play out in Bitcoin in 2021 when people started pursuing all kinds of other tokens and coins and same thing before that in 2017. Because people just have this idea of wanting to get in at a good price and wanting to get the whole thing that everyone’s talking about now. Even if rationally that makes no sense. Or if rationally some things are overvalued or haven’t fundamentally changed too much.
There’s like lots of that’s like more like investor type debates. But that’s certainly a trend that we’ve seen and you touched on one there as well. It’s like some people have just rotated their self-custody Bitcoin into some kind of tax advantage setup for themselves. And that’s like, you know, through ETFs or through treasury companies with stocks. So that’s been a bit of a trend there as well. I think.
A lot of this is also logical. have some numbers here showing sort of like how much Bitcoin has been moved by those individuals, moved or sold, depending on what it is exactly. It’s almost 700,000 Bitcoin in 2025.
But it’s like a 3 % shift. basically, started 2025, individuals had like 70 % of all the Bitcoin by estimation, our estimation, and then by the end of the year, that was 67%. So that’s a 3 % shift. It looks very daunting on a graph. It’s like, oh, all these people are selling, they’re crazy. Why are they selling their Bitcoin to BlackRock and Wall Street and all these guys?
But where else are they gonna buy it as well? Because before 2025, it’s not like these guys were holding as much Bitcoin. So logically, there’s gonna be some individuals who sell. And I think a really big question over the next decade or two is gonna be at what price are individuals willing to sell to the institutions? Because a lot of people do actually have a price. Not everyone does. Some people are like, I’m holding Bitcoin forever. I don’t care about dollars, et cetera. But that’s a portion of all the Bitcoiners.
And another portion will say, if it reaches a million, I will sell or if it reaches 500K or 10 million, like people have a price where they’re willing to sell some of it, most of them. So we’re gonna see that shift probably continue over the next decades, we imagine, where the businesses and the ETFs just keep buying up more.
Stephan Livera (26:52)
Yeah, so as you mentioned, these different trends around ownership and the patterns and yeah, as you said, there’s been this new opening of access in terms of what loans are available to you or what facilities are available. Maybe they’re switching into iBit because they want to borrow against that because it’s a cheaper rate, et cetera. You know, that’s kind of a few things. And you see these famous stories that kind of go around and…
we are seeing different institutions come in also, right? Sovereign Wealth Funds, there are some in the UAE that are known to have bought. There’s Luxembourg, there’s the Czech National Bank, there is El Salvador, there’s different countries who are, Bhutan is another big one, they’ve been doing all this Bitcoin mining. So there’s like a lot of these different moves happening all around the world. And I guess people were…
Sam Wouters (27:26)
Yeah.
Stephan Livera (27:41)
over exuberant, right? Or in terms of how quickly that would happen and how quickly the number go up would happen. So maybe that’s why some people now sort of like the sentiment is a bit down right now. But the truth is there are a lot of these institutions coming in and some of them are even buying the dip. So it’s kind of funny that there’s sort of this, you know, bullish news. should, what should be bullish news, but apparently the price is down. So what do you make of that and institutional adoption?
Sam Wouters (27:45)
Yo.
It’s unbelievable to see really. If you would have asked a Bitcoiner 10 years ago, explained all of the things that are happening now in the space and then told them what the price was at that point, I think a lot of people would be very confused. Wait, so there’s 3,000 institutions that have it. There’s 30 countries that hold Bitcoin one way or another.
Like how could it only be at like 70k that makes absolutely no sense? what, you know, wouldn’t it be at half a million or a million at that point? Like what’s going on? So I get a lot of people’s confusion there for sure. I think the institutional adoption has been, you know, it’s driven a lot of price action there. What I think, honestly, what I think the biggest reason for the sentiment being down is for a lot of people is like,
They really wish the individual would get in. lot of Bitcoiners are like personally frustrated that their friends and family are like still dismissing it, especially given that again, like 60 % of the top banks in the US are building products around this. Half the top hedge funds hold Bitcoin like the investor investment advisors. Like all of these guys are getting in. All of these big CEOs are praising it and like calling it like a phenomenal asset that they’re really interested in in a variety of ways. You already mentioned some
of
these like sovereign wealth funds, central banks buying. And despite all of that, people still manage to sort of like stick their head into the sand and tell themselves like, I’m too late to Bitcoin. It wasn’t worth it, et cetera. I think that that’s what causes a lot of individual frustration with Bitcoiners and sent them to be down because you’re like, wait, you have a generational opportunity right here when the price is at 7k, 70k to get in. You hear all of these people speaking positively about it. And you see in the data that they’re accumulating more quarter after quarter.
data unit are probably not even bothering to look at. But like all the evidence is there that all of the sort of like smart money keeps buying and you’re still just not doing it. you know, I get it that you didn’t trust it in 2017, get it that you didn’t trust it in 2021 with all of the crypto scams going around and no idea if this thing was gonna stick around. But at this point, it’s like if people still don’t get it, then yeah, there’s just so much frustration around that.
And I think that’s probably a challenge for lot of Bitcoiners personally of getting through to those people and being like, hey, come on, dude, you still have a really phenomenal opportunity here. Because at this point, like I said earlier on, it’s like a lot of people have sort of placed Bitcoin into a box in their mind and it’s the wrong box, but they’re probably not going to concede on that until it’s much too late.
So that’s honestly a really big challenge there and it’s just crazy to see all that institutional adoption happening and people are just like, you know, like it’s still too late and it’s like, no, like what is it? Like 0.02 % or something like that of all money in the world is held in Bitcoin today. Yeah, there’s…
Stephan Livera (31:00)
Yeah, I think it depends
on which metric we’re using. Like if you’re by base money or M2 and M3 and so on. And then there’s the Jesse Myers kind of chart as well of like, 1,000 trillion of assets in the world and Bitcoin is what, one and a half, two trillion-ish. It’s like, you know, so, yeah.
Sam Wouters (31:04)
For sure, yeah.
Yeah, this stuff’s hard, I just say like extremely low percentage
and then seeing gold and silver add like multiple Bitcoin market caps over a couple days time and whatnot and people still think that Bitcoin couldn’t move very quickly and make a lot of money for now. It’s like, yeah, that’s very strange to see.
Stephan Livera (31:33)
Yeah, but I think I would say for the gold case, it’s probably that, yeah, sure, there were some individuals buying too, but I think that’s really central bank driven. you know, people talking about the Chinese government buying gold and so on. So it’s kind of hard to, you know, compete with like a central bank, you know, literally buying that kind of money or that kind of…
of the asset and I think Bitcoin is just not there yet. Right now, yes, the Czech National Bank has bought some but that was kind of more like a trial amount, let’s say. So I think maybe it’s just that institutions are coming in but maybe just not at the size and scale that people had anticipated. But I guess on the flip side, maybe some of them are sort of slower in but slower out too. Like maybe they’re not as quick to kind of panic sell because they are just by nature slower moving. So it’s just kind of interesting
Sam Wouters (31:57)
Yeah.
Yep, for sure.
Stephan Livera (32:18)
to see that. What about business adoption? I know you’ve got another section on that. Do you have any comments on business adoption?
Sam Wouters (32:27)
Yeah, that’s an error we’ve been really excited about at River because we see all the big institutions. We’re also Bitcoiners at heart and we want to see as many individuals benefit from this as possible as well. It’s not just the same wealthy institutions getting wealthier.
But what we’ve been seeing there, like in 2025, we added like 2000 business clients to the platform. We now have over 3000, I think probably nearing 4000 at this point. And that growth has just been super fast and really exciting to see despite like price action being pretty sort of like even over much of 2025.
And when we look at the types of businesses that are adopting Bitcoin, that’s the most exciting part. It’s literally like agriculture companies. is like a hairdresser, biotech company, like eye doctor. You get literally everything across the spectrum. Lots of real estate investors as well, buying Bitcoin with their companies. And that’s a really exciting trend to see because it’s really starting to evolve, like Bitcoin starting to evolve to a point where it’s not just like
individuals personally taking like what they perceive as a risk with it But they also start feeling comfortable enough to say like hey all this this money that I’ve got sitting in the treasury of my company I should not be letting that erode through inflation. I should actually put that to work and bitcoins a really great way to do that That’s been a trend that we’re very exciting Very excited to see and we’ve been seeing a lot of growth there not just from like obviously like MicroStrategy and the Bitcoin Treasury companies have bought a lot of Bitcoin there over the past years, but so have a lot
of these small companies that have started accumulating to be able to like position themselves strategically to be able to grow faster than their peers to be able to preserve the purchasing power that they built up. I mean like a lot of
sort of the world thrives on private businesses doing well and being able to employ people. So that’s been a super powerful trend that we’ve seen that also interestingly enough, like it exposes a lot of those employees to Bitcoin in ways that they previously hadn’t really considered where they’re starting to see like, wait, this is really good for my business too if Bitcoin does well.
And that’s just like a super interesting Trojan horse where it gives the business owner a tool to kind of show to their business like, hey, this is something that can help us build and maintain our purchasing power and expand in all kinds of directions in the future.
Stephan Livera (34:47)
Are those business owners taking a large allocation or is it more like they come in and they might dip their toes at first? Or can you tell us a little bit about like a typical story you’re seeing there on the business adoption of Bitcoin stacking side?
Sam Wouters (35:01)
Yeah, we obviously like, I think we see a pretty big distribution there. And it’s really like, it’s quite easy to tell when a business owner is like a Bitcoiner at heart, because I’ll just put in a much larger allocation.
Stephan Livera (35:11)
Right, they’ve orange-pilled per se, and
yeah.
Sam Wouters (35:14)
Yeah, exactly. you see, you also see plenty of them that will like, we did a survey that’s in our business reports that we put out in late, sort of like late last year, I think September, October or so. And we showed the exact distribution there if people are curious about the numbers. But off the top of my head, there were quite a lot of businesses that also just put in like between like one and 5 % or like one and 10 % of the assets in their treasury into Bitcoin. So they just take a small allocation, which is like statistically,
roughly enough to offset inflation if you take Bitcoin’s average compounding annual growth rate over the past so many years. That’s enough to offset inflation if it’s just like a few percent. So that’s how a lot of businesses use it. Not so much like, I’m trying to speculate on like, will this increase the value of my treasury? But much more like, I just want to use it to make sure that I’m not losing value on my treasury and just get familiar with it with a small allocation. And what we’ve also been seeing a lot of businesses
do there is use a feature that we have on river which is Bitcoin interest on cash so they put their cash treasury into river and then they earn Bitcoin interest on that and that’s been interesting for a lot of companies too because then instead of buying they are earning it through interest
And that’s just another way of doing it. Especially like it’s nice if you, you know, might be a business owner who has a couple of co-founders or a management team and not everyone feels comfortable actually investing in Bitcoin. Well, you can just earn it and not like sort of like take on the social risk of your team thinking like, what the hell is this guy doing with our treasury? That’s way too much risk. What if it hurts the business? So it also just becomes easier for businesses to get in in a way where they don’t need to get as much approved.
or internal agreement. So yeah, across the board, like we’re seeing a spectrum there of like people who actually don’t even buy it, they just earn through interest and people who do smaller allocations and over time sort of start sizing that up or kind of like opportunistically saying like, hey, the price is a lot lower now, we had a really good quarter, let’s allocate a bunch more at the end of the quarter.
and see where that takes us over the next while. What we also ask those business…
Stephan Livera (37:21)
Yeah, yeah, because that was my, that was gonna be my
next question around that. Like, are you finding that they are doing like a typical DCA every month, or are they doing more like just kind of strategically trying to buy a dip here and there? What’s kind of the typical strategy you see for some of these business owners who are buying Bitcoin?
Sam Wouters (37:41)
Yeah, again, like a pretty big distribution. It’s like some of them DCA indeed, like it’s like whatever we have left over at the end of the week or month that we feel comfortable putting in, or we just like do a specific fixed allocation. But a lot of, I think like a good portion of them are very opportunistic, kind of like what we have available and where we can use it. Cashflow predictions are already complicated enough for businesses.
to then like if you also have to factor in like I always want to buy a thousand dollars in Bitcoin a week or so that just adds more complexity to the mix for many of them. So a lot of them will kind of like move whenever they feel it makes most sense for them. And I think like that’s, you it’s like a prudent way of going about it. It’s like the primary focus for them should obviously be making sure their business does well. And if the business does well, then that will allow them to make moves when they think it makes sense.
Stephan Livera (38:28)
Yeah, I’m interested, I’m curious if you have any thoughts or stats or analysis on individuals then, like what’s the pattern, are you seeing the typical DCA and withdraw pattern for individuals or is it a similar kind of here I’ve got a lump sum that I got from selling a property or whatever, I’m just gonna load that in now. What are you seeing there, what behavior are you seeing for the individual customers?
Sam Wouters (38:53)
Yeah, a lot of Bitcoiners who’ve gotten in over the past year, think while the price was like 100k plus or so, lot of people there have sort of preferred dollar cost averaging, having a recurring buy, just for like the don’t know where the price is going, is it going to go up a lot more or is it going to go down? Is it going to stay here for a while? I think when people don’t feel as certain where the price is going to go, that’s when they like to talk.
average more and when people feel like I’m getting a steal right now the price is way down like it has been over the past while you just typically see a lot more kind of like smash buying like people spot buying as much as they’re able to or setting setting up target price orders and of imagining like the price might dip lower than it is now let me scoop up a bunch then
So it’s like, is certainly seasonal in some sense there. It’s like the more certainty people individually feel or like the more they feel like they’re getting a good deal, the more they will immediately make decisions and the less certainty, the more they kind of like hedge that and play it a little bit safer. ⁓ One more note on the business side, because we had also actually asked the question you were asking, like what was their behavior? We had asked them the question as well on like,
Stephan Livera (39:52)
Yeah, and think it’s it’s it’s so gone
Sam Wouters (40:04)
like what’s your outlook? Like what are you planning to do with this Bitcoin? Are you like looking to hold on to this for the long term? Are you planning to accumulate more? Are you planning to sell some off if the price does well? And typically we saw that across the board, like I think the vast majority of people are like, I’m planning to hold this for the long run and like keep accumulating more where it makes sense. So people definitely have that like long-term outlook and that’s something we also see reflected with the individual clients. But that’s obviously also what we target with River. Like we’re not
We’re not a platform that tries to draw people in as quickly as possible, like maximally extract value from them. then, you know, we’re a happy business, but they’re an unhappy client. It’s the opposite. Like we’re looking to find people who want to build something up in the long run, make sure that they win and do really well. And then we will also do well as a result as a company. naturally we attract that. So naturally that’s also what we see reflected in the data. And that might not be everywhere in the industry.
of
other platforms that serve businesses and individuals.
Stephan Livera (41:02)
Yeah, I think the other thing that is so important for most people, it’s almost like we can’t reiterate this enough, like just DCA-ing during the bear markets, right? Like it is so, so important because if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve been through, know, if it’s not your first rodeo, like it is so important, these sats that you stack now in the bear markets or in these big dips.
Like they are so valuable and it’s paradoxical because a lot of people don’t realize that. what happens, because what happens is at this time you’re seeing the typical Bitcoin bears, they’re out kind of doing a victory lap and they’re saying, well, look, see Bitcoin was this price, whatever, five years ago or whatever. And look, you’re down now. You’re all a bunch of idiots. That’s the normal, the narrative that we see every cycle, right? It’s like clockwork. But the…
thing is that’s just comparing like point in time to point in time. Whereas if you were just doing DCA DCA DCA, you know, every day every week, maybe even every month, if you’re just doing that, you were like, taking advantage of that volatility so that like once Bitcoin gets back again to all time highs, you’re just way ahead. And so I think it’s it’s very counterintuitive. Like most people don’t
get that part. And so, you know, I think it’s just such an important thing for people to like really remember that like you’ve got to zoom out, you’ve got to be long term focused, but it’s easier said than done.
Sam Wouters (42:22)
Yeah, that’s where a lot of people struggle patience and a lot of our society now we like this concerns us a lot actually like looking at how exchanges that early on started offering Bitcoin then started offering like crypto other crypto coins Then when it’s a meme coins now are like essentially becoming like prediction and gambling markets It’s a very concerning trend to see because like I see people my age who are just like why would I buy Bitcoin because I can’t you know, magically 100x my money if I get
lucky and make a smart call. Like that long-term mindset is disappearing for a lot of people and you have all these companies who are preying on that and kind of trying to figure out ways to you know get these people hooked or whatever. And like this is where we’re very grateful with River where when people feel comfortable sending their friends and family over to us because they know that they’re not going to sign up and a week later they’ll get an email like hey why don’t you put 10 % of your life savings in a fardcoin because it might make you a whole bunch of money or whatever.
you bet on what the weather is going to be next week during this sports game combined with what the score is going to be. It’s like, you know, seeing the entire mind shift of society towards that stuff is very concerning to see because it, you know, just allows all these platforms to extract as much value from people as possible. Everyone’s kind of hoping for that magical hit of getting lots of money and sort of getting out of the fiat race that they’re currently in. Whereas Bitcoin is like the polar opposite of that.
But people mentally associate all of that with some kind of speculative, greedy, strange environment. But Bitcoin is so different from all of that. It’s just the fact that it lives on the same platforms as those other activities doesn’t help its reputation either. So that’s a concerning trend in general that we see and something we definitely try to distance ourselves from. Because it’s important that young people have hope.
Stephan Livera (44:11)
So my follow-up then is I know you’ve spoken about
this idea of you know what is the form of evangelism that people should do or should they evangelize Bitcoin at all. Where are you at on this question of Bitcoin evangelism?
Sam Wouters (44:24)
I have so many thoughts about this. I’ve I’ve gone through this with a lot of people over time My take on it is like a lot of Bitcoiners have been
to like, and I totally get why, but a lot of bitcoins have been overenthusiastically pushing this upon their friends and family and being like, no, come on, like you really have to read this Bitcoin book or you got to listen to all of these podcasts, watch these videos I’m sending you, read these articles. And it like for a lot of people, it doesn’t land in the way that the Bitcoin are enthusiastically like pushes it onto that person. You have to find people kind of like where they’re at. That’s what a lot of people like to say. But it’s really true. Like,
if you like a lot of people aren’t going to remember what exactly you said to them about Bitcoin. They’re not going to remember what like, you know, what exact example you were giving or metaphor to make Bitcoin really accessible. Like, it’s like digital energy or whatever. Like people aren’t going to remember a lot of that stuff, but they will just remember how you made that person feel. Like it’s kind of like a thing for almost every topic you talk about. And when every time you bump into them, you bring up Bitcoin, you become that annoying Bitcoin guy.
who’s always like pushing it into their face or who is waiting for the first opportunity in a conversation to introduce Bitcoin there and remind them that they should be investing in Bitcoin and doing something with it.
And if you’re always like starting those conversations from like I want to introduce Bitcoin to this person or like push it into this conversation as quickly as possible, then you’re like you’re also not really listening to them. You’re just waiting for an opportunity to bring it up. And that’s obviously going to frustrate people because they’re trying to tell you what’s going on in their life, what they might be frustrating about. And you’re like, I’ve got the cure here. It’s Bitcoin. Just DC into Bitcoin and your life’s going to get better. All these problems you’re describing to me are going to go away.
like that just practically doesn’t work for a lot of people. Like often they just want to be heard and I think one of the most powerful things that you can do as a Bitcoiner and I imagine you might have experienced this yourself Stephan, is like your life has probably drastically changed since you’ve gotten into Bitcoin and the friends and family that know you and they might know you as like the Bitcoin podcast guy or whatever like this is the Bitcoiner that we know who knows so much stuff about this but I’ve probably seen your life improve a lot and like you change as a person.
I don’t to give you too many compliments in front of all the listeners. they see you change as a person and they start realizing like, wait, why am I struggling and miserable? And why do I hate all these things? But this guy’s happy and he loves what he does. And keeps starting up new ventures and things or developing his life and taking things on. It’s like, how can I be more like Stephan? It’s
of like just leading by example and showing people like hey Bitcoin’s making my life better.
And you can also talk about it more in that way rather than you need to do this or you should really be reading this or buying Bitcoin or doing that. It’s like, don’t tell them what to do. It’s a little bit more like lead by example, show them examples that might actually resonate with them. I’ve gotten through, for example, to a lot of people, like they start with the whole climate angle towards Bitcoin and they go like, but it’s bad for the environment or whatnot. And instead of immediately going on the defensive and being like, no, no, no, it’s great and whatnot. I just start talking.
and like I know this project in Africa and they do this and this and that to help build up a grid there and they’re you know they’re looking a bit confused so like wait why is he talking about this yeah gridless is an example and I talked through this and then they’re like you know like instead of pushing back against what they’re saying I’m just like shifting the conversation and then kind of coming back around to like yeah
Stephan Livera (47:50)
I like gridless and stuff, yeah.
you’re sort of deflecting ⁓ into an interesting story that kind of draws them
in from that perspective maybe.
Sam Wouters (48:06)
And then,
you know, if I would have said, no, that’s not true because I know this company and they’re doing good stuff. And then they immediately feel like, you’re telling me this thing that I’ve heard in the media is not true. And like, it feels like we are clashing when we’re not actually. like, oh yeah, that’s yeah. Like, you know, could approach that from like, yeah, energy is a big problem all around the world. There’s lots of places where they don’t actually have energy grids. But I heard of this really cool story where, like I’ve seen it in the news where they’re starting to build up a microgrid in a way where it becomes much
more
like much cheaper for people much more accessible and they’re starting to grow this out like I think this has tremendous potential like you can kind of talk through it and ultimately arrive at a point where it’s like and the way this is possible it’s like well they were looking for like who could draw this electricity during the times where it’s not being used well AI can do it because they kind of need to be online all the time and then you realize like wait well these Bitcoin miners are available and like approaching that topic from that angle totally like it’s blown plenty of
of around the world when they came to that kind of realization and there’s a lot of conversations to be had that way rather than like picking the defensive position and like turning it into a clash because people walk away from that not to remember remembering the facts or the examples or the articles that you shared with them they’ll just think like did I have a good talk with that guy like did he you know like did he listen to me did he have a good responses to the things that I said or not they just won’t remember the words and that makes a really big difference in
how you talk to Bitcoin about people. So think it’s much more like just listen, like try to have conversations with people, make them feel good around you, show them how Bitcoin kind of like has improved your own life and then introduce it at the right time. And if you screwed up with someone in the past, you can also go back over to them and just tell them like, hey, sorry, I was a really annoying Bitcoin guy for like the last three months or whatever, the last five years. know that I did that because I really care about you and my own life is
Stephan Livera (50:00)
Yeah.
Sam Wouters (50:04)
been improving so much and I just wanted that for you too because I care about you. When you approach someone that way it’s…
Stephan Livera (50:08)
Yeah, and I would say this,
I think for many people, it’s a phase. It’s like when you first get into it, I remember when I was a noob and bought my first coins in 2013 and I was shouting from the rooftops. It’s a phase. I think a lot of people just go through that phase of wanting everyone else to be in Now, some people listened, some people didn’t. The ones who listened obviously have done pretty well for themselves. And then for a while, at least for me, I’ve just kind of…
Sam Wouters (50:26)
Yep.
Stephan Livera (50:38)
I see myself as like, I’m not really the first touch point for Bitcoin for a lot of people. Anyway, I’m sort of further down the funnel. So I just kind of put out content and hopefully educate people about Bitcoin. But I’m not as, you know, I don’t see myself as like a top of funnel guy.
you know, per se. So that’s kind of how I’m seeing it. I just say, like, let them come to me if they want, if they want to ask questions, they can, but kind of if I’m talking to like normies out there and they’re not Bitcoin people themselves, then I’ll just like not even mention Bitcoin and just sort of…
you know, try to talk about other things. But, you know, different approaches, like some people are really kind of skillful and really, let’s say, charismatic and maybe they draw people in with a different story or humor or some emotional hook, something like this. So, you know, just different approaches can kind of work for different people. But I think you’re right to like not be the important, like just don’t be an annoying Bitcoin guy, right? Like just, you know, try to find a balance of like how you sort of…
Sam Wouters (51:22)
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Stephan Livera (51:34)
lightly spread
a message without being overbearing, let’s say.
Sam Wouters (51:38)
It’s also better for yourself to just otherwise you’re get so frustrated with it and then what you do get is like a lot of people give up because they’re like well it’s just like my friends and family are the problem like they don’t get it they’re stubborn they don’t listen to me Yeah Like don’t yeah don’t get bitter about it
Stephan Livera (51:49)
Yeah, or then you get into the have fun, stay poor side of it where it’s just like, screw you, just have fun, stay poor and that kind of thing. And then that’s like
going too far the other way. It’s like, there’s a balance. There’s like a happy medium of like not chilling too hard, but also not being a, ⁓ if you have fun, stay poor sort of thing.
Sam Wouters (52:00)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stephan Livera (52:07)
Yeah, any closing thoughts and where can people find you online and find the report?
Sam Wouters (52:11)
Yeah, no specific closing thoughts, think. guess summarizing is like the main thing that we just found with this research in general is there are trends going on in Bitcoin that don’t necessarily reflect and applies in the price. We see a lot of Bitcoin business adoption. We see more merchant adoption. We see more lightning adoption.
Stephan Livera (52:17)
You covered it, yeah.
Sam Wouters (52:32)
They’re not going to bring us a flashy, like multiple 100,000 price in the short term, but it’s really important sort of foundational adoption that we’re seeing that is going to help set us up for the next growth and run and whatever it is, like whatever we end up going. So that’s kind of like our, I think like our overall key takeaways. Like there’s not necessarily a bear market in Bitcoin adoption. It’s just like sentiment and price are way down. But Bitcoin itself is like in a really interesting space, I think, and I really look forward to the next while.
and seeing how far that grows. As for where people can find me, I’m on Twitter at SDWouters and follow me there if you’re interested. I also ⁓ posted a bit from the River account as well and you can follow River as well. If you’re interested in research, can look it up there, we’ll post it. So yeah, that’s where people can find me and it’s been super good being on, Stephan. Great seeing you again.
Stephan Livera (53:26)
Yeah, hope to see you soon and yeah, listeners check it out. Make sure you share this episode so people learn the truth about the Lightning Network. It is growing as well as adoption. And of course, check out River. Everyone make sure you are DCA-ing in the bear market. That’s it from us. Thank you.