There is some great news for all merchants looking to start accepting payments for goods and services over the Lightning Network. BTCPay has launched its Lightning Network integrated payment processor. Last month it announced it was close to finalizing the Lightning Network implementation, but the latest news coming from the BTCPay developers suggests they are ready to launch. This could be a total gamechanger for Bitcoin payment processing and will encourage larger developers – such as Square – to get a move on with their crypto solutions.
Is the Lightning Network Close to A Soft Launch?
There has been a whole raft of activity on the Lightning Network lately, just yesterday the Lightning Network got its largest ever node! This could be a sign of a developer doing some final testing to make sure everything works properly or an invitation to hackers to try and break in. This combined with the news from BTCPay could allude to something greater, and possibly the first mainnet implementation of the Lightning Network.
LND integration to @BtcpayServer is done and now seems solid. Remaining is to include LND into the dockerfile and one click deploy and we are good @lightning @r0ckstardev
— BTCPay Server (@BtcpayServer) July 8, 2018
Bitcoin Payments Simplified
BTCPay gives merchants an easy, fast, and simplistic way to accept payments with Bitcoin. The sleek and easy to use user interface means even someone without technical knowledge or developer skills can learn to create an invoice and display the QR code to the customer. This gives BTCPay a major leg up over its competitors as they have been lambasted in the past for being too clunky and slow. Following this news, we expect Square to follow this announcement with their own testnet version of Lightning Network payments. If Square can manage to keep up with BTCPay – or at least white label the technology until their labs can create something similar – it could revolutionize the crypto payment space.
More and more companies are looking to accept Bitcoin as a payment method, and companies like BTCPay are helping this dream become a reality. CoinBase recently changed their Bitcoin payment gateway algorithm, which resulted in a handful of customers leaving for BitPay, most notably Fancy. In the short term we can expect stores to switch between payment solutions quite frequently until they find one that gels with their business model. This is an exciting space to be in and is an area that within the next 6-12 months will flourish and has the potential to change the way the world views cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
