BitPay, a well-known cryptocurrency payment processor, has now included Bitcoin’s lightning network to its platform. This will allow Bitcoin payments to settle significantly faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional transactions.
The Lightning Network is a Bitcoin ‘layer 2’ scaling solution that allows individual Bitcoin holders to create private payment channels. Users can transact numerous times off-chain with these payment channels, allowing for transaction throughput orders of magnitude higher than Bitcoin’s foundation layer. BitPay businesses can now accept payments from wallets like Strike and CashApp that use the lightning network. After Block produced its lightning network dev kit, which is published publicly for other wallet providers to adapt, the latter introduced layer 2 Bitcoin payments.
Transaction fees are nearly negligible when using this option because payments do not compete for on-chain block space. BitPay claims that its combination of on-chain and off-chain solutions now provides clients with a “fast, low-cost, and scalable” total payment experience.
To begin receiving lightning payments from clients, BitPay merchants will not need to make any modifications. Customers will instead be able to make lightning payments from lightning-enabled wallets on their own. The lightning network has yet to be enabled in BitPay’s native wallet. The lightning network is frequ;ently heralded as the technology that will enable Bitcoin to scale as a global currency. Senator Cynthia Lummis said in a recent interview that it would “very fast” change Bitcoin from a commodity to a currency.
Read more: Lightning Labs boosts the Bitcoin lightning network by raising USD 70 million
