Merchants that leverage BitPay's payment processing platform can now receive payments from lightning wallets which enables cheaper and faster transactions.
BitPay has served as a Bitcoin payment processor for merchants since 2011. Naturally, since BitPay is one of the oldest companies in the space, they have accrued one of the widest array of merchants who accept Bitcoin payments. Their reach spans hundreds of millions of people across more than 200 countries around the world.
Lightning Network integration into BitPay's payment processors can spread Bitcoin adoption faster since it reduces the time and cost to settle transactions. It is not yet as widely used as legacy payment rails such as credit cards, but the Lightning Network integration can be a big step forward in changing that, and has the theoretical capacity to dwarf legacy payment rails.
“The Bitcoin Lightning Network provides our customers with instant payments and exceptionally low network fees, and creates more opportunity for all holders of bitcoin to shop online”, said Michael Relich, co-CEO of PacSun, who’s an online retail store and one of the first BitPay partners to accept Bitcoin payments using Lightning.