CoinGate is launching Bitcoin Lightning Network payment processing for merchants

CoinGate is a payment gateway for cryptocurrencies, and we have always been staunch supporters of Bitcoin. Since 2014, when we started developing our platform, we were driven by the unique community spirit surrounding Bitcoin, and, equally importantly, by Bitcoin’s technological potential. As such, we decided to operate accordingly: aiming to contribute to the network to the best of our ability whilst reaping the benefits that Bitcoin presented to us. And so, since 2015, all of our transactions have been batched to minimize the strain we put on the network, and in December of last year we became one of the first payment processors to integrate SegWit.

Today, we have an exciting announcement to make, regarding a further improvement of our platform and adoption of a Bitcoin scaling solution.

Lightning Network is the next major technological innovation in the Bitcoin space. Although still in its early stages and more suited to advanced, technical users, LN is, without doubt, the most awaited upgrade to the Bitcoin network.

Implementing Lightning payments has been our aspiration for a long time and we are excited to finally launch it in our Sandbox environment. An intense testing phase is ongoing and we welcome everyone to give Lightning Network a try by purchasing a virtual cup of coffee on our test shop.

In the meantime, we are preparing to run pilot integrations in live environment with a select group of merchants that wish to join us in becoming early adopters of this exciting tech. If you are interested in accepting Bitcoin payments via Lightning Network with CoinGate, please fill out this form.

A word of warning though - the Lightning Network is in its early stages:

• it is not yet user-friendly, and really more suited to advanced (technical) users, though we are sure this will change soon with growing adoption;
• there will be bugs, both in the Lightning Network itself, and in our implementation of it; this is expected, and the reason we are publishing this post is precisely to get community feedback and squash those bugs before releasing the Lightning Network in the live environment.

Any feedback is very welcome and encouraged; please write to us at lightning@coingate.com regarding anything related to LN.

To those unfamiliar with CoinGate, we are based in Vilnius, Lithuania, and have been building and operating our platform since mid-2014. We started off slowly, but grew very quickly in 2017 and, at the present time, we serve over 4,000 merchants using our gateway to accept 50+ cryptocurrencies. We are quite popular among technical businesses (VPN, hosting and similar) and niche industries, but our focus and ultimate goal is to bring cryptocurrency payments mainstream and to make them one of the default payment methods in everyday shopping. We have always strived to be a community-oriented payment processor, and we are proud to still charge zero transaction fees to shoppers, and to source our exchange rates without hidden markups. If you are interested in our platform, please visit coingate.com.

Submitted May 20, 2018 at 07:54PM by CoinGate https://ift.tt/2IzuHHg