Xapo Bank Enables Lightning Bitcoin Payments With Lightspark Partnership

Private bank Xapo Bank, which holds a license from Gibraltar, has teamed up with Lightspark, the company founded by former Facebook cryptocurrency lead David Marcus, to integrate the Lightning Network for its clients to make almost instantaneous Bitcoin payments.

Xapo Bank customers can now make small purchases up to $100 USD at any vendor that accepts Lightning payments without having to pay high transaction fees or wait a long time for settlement. With this integration, Xapo Bank will be the first privately owned bank with a complete license to accept Lightning payments.

CEO of Xapo Bank Seamus Rocca stated that “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 also explained that Xapo Bank provides a 4.1% annual interest rate on US dollars and will soon provide up to 1% on Bitcoin, with payments made every day.

Co-founder and CEO of Lightspark David Marcus commented that the company is thrilled to enable the first bank on the Lightning Network in order to provide its customers with instant and cheap Bitcoin transactions.

“Xapo has been one of our early closed beta partners, and we're delighted they chose 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 on it,” said Marcus.

Xapo Bank customers can pay via the Lightning Network by holding Bitcoin in the Xapo Bank App and pay an invoice at any vendor that accepts Lightning payments by scanning the invoice.

Each transaction on the network is subject to a small fee, and Xapo Bank has set a fixed fee of 15 sats to safeguard users from executing transactions with high fees.