The payment gateway CoinGate announced the launch of a platform that will allow transactions through Lightning Network (LN), facilitating Bitcoin (BTC) payments to about 4,000 merchants. The information was released on September 5th on the CoinGate blog and explains that Bitcoin (BTC) payments on the Lightning Network debuted in San Francisco, United States, during the TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 event.
The purpose is to allow payment with minuscule fees and obtain instant confirmations, according to the company statement, adding that it sought to reduce technical barriers for merchants while allowing users to enable or disable Lightning Network with the push of a button.
“Since LN (Lightning Network) has yet to undergo a full live usage test, CoinGate had to ensure that transactions were secure and, if an error occurred, the company was ready to cover its customers’ losses. However, during the 8-week trial, the system did not experience any significant errors and was ready to maintain high volumes,” stated CoinGate.
CoinGate launched the first Bitcoin (BTC) payments processing platform to adopt Lightning Network
CoinGate had shown a broad interest in collaborating with the development of Lightning Network since May 2018 when it had already enabled a tool for its users to test the network. Since then, the possibility of launching the system has been evaluated, and now it becomes one of the first Bitcoin (BTC) payments processing platforms to adopt this technology and manage one of the more than 2,000 LN nodes.
With this initiative, the Lithuanian-based company, CoinGate, claimed to be looking for innovative ways to solve Bitcoin (BTC) scalability problem, to which Lightning Network has been seen as a good option.
Despite a Diar study, published last June, that argued that Lightning Network is not as effective at routing payments as it is believed, other companies follow the same line of action as CoinGate. One of them, the BTCPay application, is enabling the possibility of running a Lightning Network node and perform transactions with Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC).
