More and more stores are beginning to accept payment in cryptocurrency. But for this, special software needs to be set up that will allow cryptocurrency payments to be accepted. Setting up bitcoin payments for your store will be quite easy if you use special software from Bitfury. The Bitfury startup is best known for its products for mining the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Now it has released a software suite that makes it easy to connect to the bitcoin Lightning Network (LN). LN is a p2p platform that significantly increases the speed of Bitcoin and Litecoin transactions, making them much cheaper.
However, LN itself is complicated to set up, and this hinders the system's widespread adoption. Fortunately, the Bitfury startup has introduced new tools that simplify the initial LN setup, which should stimulate the adoption of Lightning by merchant companies. Bitfury's software package, called Lightning Peach, is ready to work right away. It includes a wallet, a plugin for online stores, and tools for developers. The company even offers a hardware terminal for points of sale. It seems that Bitfury has everything needed to set up the operation of marketplaces that would like to accept bitcoins.
Lightning Peach project lead Pavel Prikhodko explained that their software standardizes much of the technical work involved in implementing Lightning, making it far more accessible for merchant companies. In one of his interviews, Prikhodko stated: "Lightning Peach allows you to automatically manage channel throughput, connection to hubs, and payment routing, and it also integrates easily into existing online-store solutions, so the merchant does not even need to go into any technical details." Bitfury will operate a public Lightning node so that any user who wishes can connect to the network to make Lightning payments using mobile or desktop wallets.
The Lightning Network was first announced in 2015, and only in 2018 was its beta version launched. Meanwhile, bitcoin payments have for many years been dominated by centralized payment platforms such as BitPay, thanks to their ease of use. Over the past few months, the Lightning network has shown rapid growth, although such growth seems to have its downsides too. The Lightning network is still rather centralized, as it is dominated by a few large payment hubs. For example, one unknown entity called LNBIG owns 20 nodes, handling 60% of this network's traffic. Recently, the payment gateway Coingate also integrated Lightning into its payment platform. Now the question of whether such "centralized adoption" of LN will lead to vital mass acceptance or will violate the spirit of peer-to-peer networks remains open.
