Xapo is partnering with Lightspark to allow customers to send bitcoins quickly to vendors that accept BTC via Lightning.
Gibraltar-licensed private bank Xapo Bank has partnered with Lightspark, a startup led by former Facebook crypto chief David Marcus, to integrate the Lightning Network and enable near-instant bitcoin payments for its customers.
Xapo Bank members can now make small purchases of up to $100 USD at any vendor that accepts Lightning payments, without high transaction fees and long blockchain confirmation waiting times. This integration will make Xapo Bank the first licensed private bank to offer Lightning payments.
The Lightning Network enables scalable payments in the millions of transactions per second throughout the network, reducing the time-consuming and expensive experience often faced by users paying for small transactions in bitcoin.
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 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, for daily payments.
“We are thrilled to enable the first bank on the Lightning Network to offer fast and low-cost Bitcoin payments to our customers,” said David Marcus, co-founder and CEO of Lightspark. “Xapo has been one of our early closed beta partners, and we are delighted that they chose Lightspark’s enterprise-class solution to reliably send and receive payments on the Lightning Network without all the complexity and operational overhead that typically comes with these nodes.
Xapo Bank members can pay through the Lightning Network by holding bitcoins in the Xapo Bank App and scanning and paying invoices at any merchant that accepts Lightning payments.
The network charges a small fee for each transaction, and Xapo Bank has set a fixed payment fee for 15 sat to protect members from transactions with high fees.