Bitfury Partners With BTCBIT to Launch Bitcoin Lightning Network Payments

A team of Bitfury’s Lightning Peach engineers on January 15, 2019, announced its collaboration with BTCBIT, a Poland-based cryptocurrency exchange to launch a Lightning Network payment channel allowing for a safer, faster, and more cost-efficient transfer of digital assets on the exchange.

Stoking Adoption

Per Lightning Peach’s Medium blog, the new payment solution takes advantage of the Bitcoin Lightning network which is a second layer protocol aimed at eliminating scalability bottlenecks.  

Initially built on top of the Bitcoin network, the Lightning network supports micropayments and allows users to transact using an opened payment channel. Notably, while the opening of the channel is recorded on a distributed ledger, transactions that occur within it are only recorded when the channel is closed by the user. Thus, the channel can be left open for hours, days, or weeks while proceedings take place.

Lightning Peach confirms that this mode of operation makes for instant micropayments in comparison to credit cards and other means of payment.  Moreover, the network still provides a safe platform for these operations to be carried out.

In light of its partnership with BTCBIT, the blockchain technology company said users of the cryptocurrency exchange will now be able to harness the power of Lightning in transferring or making bitcoin payments.

“This is an integration that will help more people use bitcoin in their everyday lives in a faster and more convenient way,” declared Lightning Peach.

Therefore, a new customer that intends to convert their cryptocurrency to fiat currency on BTCBIT will need to follow a list of processes which have been outlined.

Some of these include the opening and validating of an account, launching the Lightning mobile application, and making a transfer from the user’s wallet to the address or QR code specified by the exchange and more.

Thereafter, funds will be transferred to the sender’s bank account between 1 to 3 working days in the case of SEPA and 3 to 5 working days if the SWIFT cross border payment is used.

The blog also notes that all Lightning transactions that have been made, are accessible in the history column that has been provided.

A Steady Progress

It’s worth noting that Bitfury has been hard at work trying to make the most of the Bitcoin Lightning Network. On July 20, 2017, Bitfury revealed it had successfully tested the Lightning Network by sending bitcoin in real-time, acknowledging the capabilities of the protocol.

Also, on November 28, 2018, Bitfury announced its partnership with Paytomat, a blockchain-based payment processing system, to enable the use of the platform to transfer bitcoins over the Lightning network.

With the way forward-thinking firms are integrating Lightning into their operations, it’s only a matter of time before Bitcoin scalability menace becomes a thing of the past.

BTCManager on November 16, 2018, informed that the Bitcoin Lightning Network had reached over 40000 nodes with a capacity of 123.22 BTC and 11,909 payment channels.