And so it begins – LN just got a another major crypto payment gateway that plans to implement their network on its platform. Aside of CoinGate, Lightning Network is already implemented on BTCPay.
CoinGate is a cryptocurrency payment gateway, enabling various businesses to accept Bitcoin and Altcoin payments. The company offers payouts either in bitcoins, or in EUR / USD, eliminating any risk associated with Bitcoin price volatility.
The Lightning Network is a “second layer” payment protocol that operates on top of a blockchain (most commonly Bitcoin). It enables instant transactions between participating nodes and has been touted as a solution to the bitcoin scalability problem.
Coingate was quick to implement SegWit as well, they did it in December of last year and became one of the first payment processors to integrate it.
Yesterday they announced a further improvement of their platform and adoption of a LN Bitcoin scaling solution.
On a long post on Reddit, CoinGate explained that they see Lightning Network as 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 on their agenda for a long time and they will be initially launching it in a Sandbox environment. An intense testing phase is ongoing and they invite everyone to give Lightning Network a try by purchasing a virtual cup of coffee on our test shop (using testnet bitcoins).
If you are interested in accepting Bitcoin payments via Lightning Network with CoinGate, please fill out this form.
CoinGate also warned users that Lightning Network is still a fledgling technology in beta phase:
- 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.
CoinGate is a Lithuanian-based crypto startup founded in 2014 and they serve around 4000 merchants who accept more than 50 different crypto coins as a payment method.
