The Lightning Network is quickly gaining traction in the Bitcoin community, and as such, more and more places are beginning to run their own nodes in order to participate. In breaking news, Bitfinex has decided to start accepting deposits using the Lightning Network and has launched its own node to facilitate this process. It becomes part of a very exclusive club of exchanges, numbering less than 20.
Trading Crypto with Small Amounts of Crypto
The Lightning Network is designed to make transacting in Bitcoin plausible for small amounts and microtransactions, as opposed to larger transactions. Having a Lightning Network channel with more than 0.5 BTC is fairly rare, so the notion of trading with funds you can easily send through the Lightning Network without causing a stir is rather odd. While this new depositing method might make no sense and be not much more than a novelty for whales and experienced traders, for small fish traders and newbies to the crypto world, this is quite a handy feature to have.
Test it Out for free
If you’ve never used the Lightning Network before and want to test it out, you can do it for free. All you have to do is create a Bottle account and link it to one of your social media accounts – beware of data mining. This will give you 1,000 sats that you can then use to fund your first channel with Bitfinex and text out the Lightning Network. While 1,000 sats won’t get you anything, it’s a nice pot of sats for you to play with and test out the Lightning Network.
While not everyone will be rushing to try out this new deposit method, it’s certainly a nice novelty for small crypto traders to have access to. It won’t be long before every crypto exchange on the planet is cashing in on the Lightning Network, especially as Bitcoin transaction fees climb higher following the halving in May 2020.
