On March 2, Xapo Bank announced its partnership with Lightspark, a company led by David Marcus, former crypto boss at Facebook. The partnership aims to extend the utility of bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Xapo revealed on Thursday that it is the first fully licensed private bank to offer payments through the Lightning Network.
Xapo CEO Sees Lightning Network Integration as a Solution to High Fees and Long Transaction Times
Xapo has partnered with Lightspark to integrate the Lightning Network, according to an announcement sent to Bitcoin.com News. The company, founded in 2013, detailed that its clients can now pay for small purchases of up to $100 at any vendor that accepts Lightning Network payments. Additionally, Xapo is offering interest-bearing U.S. dollar bank accounts, with plans to soon offer the same for bitcoin. Xapo CEO Seamus Rocca believes that using the Lightning Network can help clients avoid long wait times and higher onchain fees.
“The average transaction confirmation time of one hour combined with potentially large fees during periods of high usage make the Bitcoin network unsuitable for small daily payments such as groceries,” Rocca said in a statement. “By integrating with the hyper-efficient Lightning Network, we are the first bank in the world to streamline this process and allow our members to pay for small purchases with bitcoin without having to convert to USD first.”
At the same time, Jack Dorsey’s payments firm, Block, launched a new Lightning Network service provider called “c=.” The c= venture notes on the website that it is partnering with wallets, businesses, and Lightning nodes. During the Xapo-Lightspark announcement, Rocca said that “against a backdrop of hyperinflation, economic uncertainty, and political turmoil,” the demand for bitcoin payment integrations continues to grow. “We need integrations like this that open up access to bitcoin payments,” the Xapo CEO insisted.
To use the Lightning Network via Xapo, clients need to have bitcoin (BTC) in their Xapo Bank App. Then, users can scan a Lightning Network invoice and pay any merchant with the application. Xapo detailed that the network will charge a small number of satoshis for the transaction. David Marcus, CEO and co-founder of Lightspark, explained that Xapo has been one of the firm’s closed beta partners.
“We’re delighted they chose Lightspark’s enterprise-grade solution to reliably send and receive payments on the Lightning Network without all the complexity and operational overhead that typically comes with running a node on it,” Marcus said. At the time of writing, the Lightning Network has a total capacity of 5,421.53 BTC.
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