Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange, has announced that it now supports Bitcoin’s Lightning Network for low-cost and quick BTC deposits and withdrawals, according to a statement provided to Bitcoin Magazine.
Pierre Rochard, Bitcoin product manager at Kraken, stated:
“The first to adopt Bitcoin will be those who have currency in their bank accounts and need to convert it to Bitcoin. Kraken is an excellent venue for them to do so, after which they may load their mobile Lightning wallet with funds and use it as a medium of exchange. Without a doubt, this is the next step in Bitcoin’s development.”
With its own lightning node, Kraken joined the Lightning Network. The new connection, which permits deposits and withdrawals of up to 0.1 BTC, or 10 million satoshis per transfer, is now available to all of the company’s clients. By employing smart contracts to isolate small and frequent payments away from the Bitcoin network’s base layer, Lightning enables inexpensive and quick bitcoin transactions. Payment channels are a kind of abstraction in which users lock up bitcoin on-chain by generating 2-of-2 multisig addresses, which they can then use to transfer payments off-chain.
As bitcoin is routed across channels from sender to recipient, Lightning scales the Bitcoin blockchain as a second layer and empowers BTC to be better used as a medium of exchange. It establishes an overlay network of payment channels indirectly connected to each other that can theoretically perform millions of transactions per second. Kraken chose Lightning Labs’ LND node implementation because of the API interface it can expose and the extensive developer documentation it provides, according to Rochard.
Read more: Kraken CEO takes a dig at Canada’s Financial System, supports truckers
