About

What this is

The Lightning Network explained as a live 3D machine. Every piece you see is a real part of how Lightning works: a wallet, an invoice, a channel, liquidity, HTLCs, routing, fees, justice, nodes, and the Bitcoin bedrock below. The numbers on screen are read from public network data while you watch.

Lightning payments are private. This site never claims to show live payments. It shows live network data: nodes, channels, capacity, fees, blocks. Every number carries its fetch time.

Why it exists

Everyone explains Lightning with words, and it stays abstract: channels, liquidity, HTLCs, things you have to take on faith. But it is a machine, and a machine can be shown. This site exists so you can point at each part and watch it move.

Watt is a character

The mechanic in the corner is not a person. Watt is a written character: his guided tour is a hand-written script read by a synthetic voice, and his live answers come from an AI model that may only use a short fact card per piece. If he gets something wrong, that is the author's error, and it gets fixed.

How it is built

Next.js and React Three Fiber, drawn live in your browser in real 3D. Network data comes from mempool.space and blockstream.info through a small server cache, so the site works even where those APIs are blocked. No ads, no accounts, no cookies, no trackers.

Credit

The concept comes from visualizebitcoin.org, built by Tote for Bitcoin layer 1. This project brings the same idea to the Lightning Network, with his inspiration fully acknowledged.

Who made it

Guillaume, an independent builder in El Salvador. The code is open source under the MIT license: github.com/guillaumehussong/visualize-lightning.