Xapo is partnering with Lightspark to allow its customers to send bitcoin almost instantly to any provider that accepts BTC via Lightning.
Gibraltar-licensed private bank Xapo Bank has partnered with Lightspark, the startup headed by former Facebook crypto head David Marcus, to integrate the Lightning Network and enable near-instantaneous bitcoin payments for its customers.
Xapo Bank members can now make small purchases of up to $100 USD at any provider that accepts Lightning payments, without high transaction fees and long blockchain confirmation wait times. This integration will make Xapo Bank the first fully licensed private bank to offer Lightning payments.
The Lightning Network enables scalable payments in millions of transactions per second over the network, reducing the costly and time-consuming experiences often faced by users paying for small bitcoin transactions.
Seamus Rocca, CEO of Xapo Bank, said regarding the partnership: “By integrating with the hyper-efficient Lightning Network, we are the first bank in the world to streamline this process and allow our members to pay for small purchases with Bitcoin without having to convert to USD. first”. Rocca added that Xapo Bank offers an annual interest rate of 4.1% in US dollars and will soon offer up to 1% in Bitcoin, to be paid daily.
“We are thrilled to enable the first bank on the Lightning Network to offer instant and cheap Bitcoin payments to its customers,” said David Marcus, co-founder and CEO of Lightspark. “Xapo has been one of our first closed beta partners, and we’re thrilled that they’ve chosen Lightspark’s enterprise-grade solution to reliably send and receive payments on the Lightning Network without all the complexity and operational overhead that typically comes with running a node in it”.
Xapo Bank members can pay via the Lightning Network by holding bitcoin in the Xapo Bank app and scanning and paying an invoice at any merchant that accepts Lightning payments.
The network charges a small fee for each transaction, and Xapo Bank has set a flat payment fee of 15 sats to protect members from executing transactions with high fees.
