Cash App to roll out Bitcoin Lightning Network.

Cash App has been offering Bitcoin on its phone app since 2017 & now the mobile payment provider is rolling out the Lightning network to its massive user base of 36 million users.

This is huge news for the worlds No 1 cryptocurrency bitcoin as it will help mass adoption of bitcoin because it will make the whole payment process a lot faster. People are always looking for ways to do things faster in our ever growing society & bitcoin is increasingly being seen as another fast payment system. Cash App is helping to make this happen.

What’s the Bitcoin Lightning Network?

As a payments solution, Bitcoin still isn’t fast enough having only five transactions per second (TPS) throughput and an average transaction fee of $1.79.

Having an $1.79 transaction fee is still relatively low compared to April 2021 highs, when it cost on average $62.78 to send bitcoin. Still, this is seen as too expensive to be mass-adopted as a payment solution.

Now enter the Lightning Network, which brings low transaction fees & much higher scalability via its layer-2 solution.

How it works is by taking transactions off the main blockchain & into peer-to-peer “payment channels” between two parties. For example a buyer and a coffee shop. Once that channel is established, an unlimited number of transactions can go through the channel instantly.

The payer must then lock Bitcoin into the network which opens a payment channel. Once locked & the payment channel is open, the seller can then invoice amounts of the cost of goods and services sold.

The fees come from a combination of routing charges for routing payment information between Lightning Nodes and bitcoin’s transaction fees to open and close channels. But these are still significantly less than direct main chain transactions & that’s how the Bitcoin lightning Network is faster & cheaper to use.

One more sign of mass adoption was back in September 2021. There was a big surge in the use of the lightning network as El Salvador’s Chivo wallet went online, the chivo wallet uses the bitcoin lighting network.