A whole new kind of lightning & fiat interface through debit cards? Announcing lastbit

Soon after Satoshi made his big announcement more than a decade ago, a lot of concerns emerged pointing towards a crucial problem on his solution: scalability. Particularly since Mt. Gox, a lot started to change for Bitcoin. Out in the open, a multitude of crypto exchanges started popping up making Bitcoin and other coins easily accessible to pretty much anyone. Nevertheless, the original concerns on Satoshi’s proposal remained. In parallel and away from the spotlight, a group of passionate developers started crafting the solution to Bitcoin’s scalability problem. Today the solution is here and it’s name is the Lightning Network.

Currently, users can access for free a wide range of Bitcoin Lightning wallets. Nevertheless, instant Bitcoin payments are still far from mainstream. Most of these wallets are extremely hard to use and as such are only catered to the most experienced of users. Despite that, the future of Lightning looks bright. As of today, there are over 11K Lightning nodes out there and this number is steadily growing. Lightning’s case of becoming the solution to Bitcoin’s woes looks strong.

Holding that as a North star, we started building a solution to combine hardware level security with Lightning to enable instant Bitcoin to fiat transactions on hardware at a POS through debit card emulation.This project was overly ambitious and we quickly realized not enough people cared enough about hardware level security for payments. But the ground we covered was not in vain. During the process of building our hardware solution and talking to our beta users we came across a powerful discovery: enabling small and instant Bitcoin payments with zero fees to mainstream users via Lightning could be the way to finally make Bitcoin a widely and globally used means of payment.

During the last few years, we’ve seen titans, such as Coinbase and Binance, emerge. Undeniably, these projects have helped Bitcoin tremendously by raising awareness and making onboarding to the cryptocurrency easy and intuitive globally. Nevertheless, an equivalent figure to position Bitcoin as a globally usable currency via Lightning is yet to come.

With this in mind, we built an interoperable payments layer between Bitcoin (Lightning & On-Chain) and Euros (to start with), using payment instruments familiar to mainstream consumers, namely IBAN’s and debit cards. This means, users can move between Bitcoin and Euros in either direction, with a single interface.

This will allow users to:

-(i) Send and receive Bitcoin payments both form and to Lightning wallets and Bitcoin on-chain wallets;

-(ii) Send and receive Euro payments both from and to IBAN’s and debit cards;

-(iii) Make Bitcoin payments, both Lightning and on-chain, directly from Euro denominated IBAN’s and/or a debit cards; and

-(iv)Top-up Euro denominated debit cards directly with Bitcoin.

All of this was carefully built in response to what we heard from the community and as we mention throughout our story. We’ve dedicated the last few years of our lives and the foreseeable future to make this happen and we simply want to make it possible for more people to do things with Bitcoin.

TLDR: Lastbit is putting out a beta application that contains a single interface to Bitcoin, Lightning, Euros and debit cards. This app will allow users to move between these payment instruments in any direction they like. Get paid in Euros from a Lightning invoice? Sure. Pay Euros to a Lightning invoice? Sure. Swipe a debit card and pay for your purchase with a Lightning invoice? Sure. And more.

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*We are still in beta and will soon start to roll-out in Europe

Submitted August 28, 2020 at 09:39PM by bm_bkly https://ift.tt/31C8q7O