Get the weekly summary of crypto market analysis, news, and forecasts! This Week’s Summary The crypto market ends the week at a total market capitalization of $2,17 trillion. Bitcoin continues to trade at around $62,300. Ethereum experiences no changes and stagnates at around $2,400. XRP is down by 2%, Solana by 1%, and Dogecoin by 3%. Almost all altcoins are trading in the red, with very few exceptions. The DeFi sector decreased the total value of protocols (TVL) to around…
Cash App Rolls Out Lightning Network For Free Bitcoin Transfers
Jack Dorsey’s Block promised to be at the forefront of Bitcoin innovation. Now, they are starting to deliver. Cash App finally confirmed free and free and instant Bitcoin transfers anywhere in the world.
Block (formerly Square) finally integrates the Lightning Network with its Cash App. A feature promised back in 2019 will soon be available to all U.S. users.
Users will soon instantly send Bitcoin to any wallet that can accept Lightning Network payments. This includes wallets such as Chivo, Muun and Blue Wallet. Moreover, users will send money to any merchant that accepts Lightning payments.
The company said that the feature would be available over the coming weeks for all U.S. users. Last week, Cash App gave a handful of users access to the quality. Some of them posted screenshots of the news on social media.
The news are real! @CashApp added #Bitcoin Lightning ⚡️Network ? pic.twitter.com/zbbdqcx0dC
— Yegor Petrov ?⚡️ (@yeg0rpetrov) January 11, 2022
Low Fees For BTC Payments
Lightning network is a layer two payment processor that settles Bitcoin payments off-chain. First, the user has to put up a certain amount of Bitcoin to start a channel. Then, they can send smaller sums to the people in that channel without paying high Bitcoin transaction costs.
Finally, a user can close the channel, which writes the final balance on the Bitcoin blockchain. That means that the fees on the network are not zero. However, they are still very small relative to traditional Bitcoin payments.
However, the Lightning network has its issues. Firstly, setting up a lightning channel used to be very complicated, which kept out a lot of users.
Moreover, BTC’s volatility is still an issue for the network. New users don’t want to put up large quantities of Bitcoin for fear of losing their investment.
Technical Issues
Block CEO Jack Dorsey (and the former CEO of Twitter) promised the feature back in 2019. Dorsey himself is a believer in the network. He is also an investor in Lightning Labs, the company behind the Lightning Network.
However, technical issues slowed the progress down. In particular, it would not have been possible without an asset by Spiral, the Lightning Development Kit. Spiral is a Block-owned company.
The dev kit just came out a month ago and is a gamechanger in terms of how easy it is to set up a Lightning channel. It allows users to “build a lightning node without worrying about implementing low-level lightning logic.”
Spiral posted the library on GitHub, a site for sharing free software, to make Bitcoin payments easier. At the time, Dorsey explained his motivation for the move.
“Our goal is to make Bitcoin the native currency of the internet, and If we do that, we have a new global reserve currency based on sound principles. Something that’s deflationary that is accessible to every single person on the planet, that they can use to hold, to save, and also to transact with any internet service you can imagine,” Dorsey said.
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maximalist and a “true believer” in the crypto space. Recently, he came out with an idea for a legal fund for Bitcoin devs.
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