Bitpay Shuns Lightning and Liquid, Says Actual Bitcoin Payments Still Dominate

gepubliceerd op by Cointele | gepubliceerd op

Pioneering crypto payments service Bitpay has revealed that Bitcoin still overwhelmingly dominates payments and that it has no plans to use second layer solutions like the Lightning or Liquid networks.

Bitcoin is often criticised as a payment method because it is slow - the network can process just a handful of transactions per second - and expensive but it remains the preferred payment method on Bitpay.

"As of March, Bitcoin continues to be both the largest and most popular crypto asset representing over 95% of transactions by volume for BitPay," the company's Chief Marketing Officer Bill Zielke told Cointelegraph.

"Bitcoin Cash ranks second representing nearly 2%. Bear in mind, BitPay has been processing Bitcoin for almost 9 years and stablecoins for less than one year."

Bitpay is one of the most well-known names when it comes to Bitcoin payment processing and has thousands of merchants in its network.

Lightning is not in our current plansZielke said that for now, BitPay has no plans to utilize second layer, alternative options for transferring Bitcoin such as the Lightning Network or the Liquid sidechain.

These additional protocol layers have different tradeoffs than the base Bitcoin blockchain.

The Lightning Network is effectively a system of cached Bitcoin payments that can be used to enable instant, nearly-free payments, while Liquid works on a model of third-party custody to create a permissioned Bitcoin sidechain via a federation of exchanges and other notable entities in the Bitcoin space.

Notably, both Lightning and Liquid are available on BTCPay Server, which was originally launched as a protest against BitPay during the drama around the Bitcoin block size debate.

More generally, BitPay has seen a big increase recently in crypto payments for everything from everyday grocery items to things like gift cards and purchases related to online gaming.

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