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E-Commerce Platforms Get Hit With Lightning-Fast Bitcoin Payments for Businesses

July 15, 2018

Payment platform Strike has launched an API for Lightning micro-payments, allowing businesses to receive aggregated Bitcoin transactions through a WooCommerce plugin developed by ACINQ. Transactions are made via the Lightning Network, a scalability solution for instant payments that is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.

The WooCommerce plugin can be set up for Lightning payments on WordPress online stores. It features a user-friendly dashboard that allows business owners to monitor payments in real time.

The plugin is a follow-up to ongoing efforts by ACINQ, a tech company, to make Bitcoin deliver on its global promise of being more than just an asset, like gold.

Unlike gold, Bitcoin is the anti-brick. It’s a digital currency that is more malleable than metal, more divisible and more capable of being quickly distributed. Unlike gold, it can also be further developed and improved to meet the demands of cashless societies and cross-border transactions. Outside of Bitcoin’s value as a new deflationary asset with a limited supply that can rival gold, the bar for success rests in its ability to be utilized as an everyday currency, spent by consumers and collected by merchants. In order to do that, it needs to ramp up transaction speeds dramatically and offer lower fees.

Paris-based tech company ACINQ has been developing and building products and services, and working on scalability solutions for the Bitcoin ecosystem since 2014. It first announced the successful test of a payment routing prototype for the Lightning Network with the implementation of Bitfury’s Flare in September, 2016.

The Lightning Network (LN) is a network of bidirectional payment channels that can transfer value off-blockchain. Further decentralizing Bitcoin’s operations, LN is a scaling solution because it defers broadcasting transactions to the blockchain.

Strike is also developing APIs for Prestashop and Shopify, and says upcoming releases are coming soon.

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