With the announcement that his Lightning Network wallet, Strike, has collaborated with Shopify, NCR, and Blackhawk Network, Zap payment creator Jack Mallers is bringing Bitcoin back to its roots.
According to Mallers, any website that uses Shopify for online card transactions can now use Bitcoin’s Lightning Network to process payments. The collaboration is online right now, and it’s a huge step toward Bitcoin’s broad adoption.
“Any online merchant that uses Shopify can accept payments without the 1949 boomer network, receive it instantly, cash final, no intermediary no 3% fee”
A slide came during the presentation that listed some of America’s largest stores, including McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, and Best Buy. According to their websites, Blackhawk and NCR also serve Starbucks, Chipotle, El Corte Ingles, Lowe’s, Staples, Woolworths, and thousands of other global retailers.
We’ll have to watch for further information to learn when and how some of these businesses will begin accepting Bitcoin. However, as per Maller, the Lightning Network will now accept Bitcoin at nearly 400,000 locations.
The Lightning Network has been integrated by Robinhood, Kraken, and BitPay in recent weeks. The Lightning Network is a Bitcoin layer two solutions that employ smart contracts to settle payments instantly and with low fees.
Rather than focusing primarily on Bitcoin’s role as digital gold, it promotes its use as a digital currency. Bitcoin has received a lot of attention as an inflation hedge and a gold competitor.
Bitcoin can now scale to compete with any fiat currency on the planet thanks to the Lightning Network. Instantly settling payments with close to 0 percent fees is hard to compete against. Maller has just taken a major step forward in the adoption of cryptocurrency as a daily payment option. Mallers’ presentation has received a lot of positive feedback, including from Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.
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