Blockchain technology firm Bitfury Group has released a series of new tools for merchants and developers in a bid to drive wider adoption of the Lightning Network (LN). The launch was announced in a blog post from Bitfury’s LN engineering team, “Lightning Peach,” Jan. 23.
Bitfury’s new LN-related offerings span an open source LN-enabled Bitcoin (BTC) wallet, a hardware LN payments terminal and e-commerce software for merchants, a host of developer tools, and a public LN node to facilitate users’ creation of LN payment channels.
The Lightning Network is a second-layer solution to Bitcoin’s scalability limitations, which works by opening payment channels between users to keep the majority of transactions off-chain, turning to the underlying Blockchain only to record the net results.
Valery Vavilov, CEO of Bitfury, has said the products’ release aims to enable everyday use of Bitcoin and encourage worldwide adoption of blockchain technology.
In a summary of the new wallet’s functionality, dubbed “Peach,” Bitfury has clarified that the wallet will be able to handle both regular on-chain BTC transactions and LN payments. The wallet will reportedly also be able to create a channel using a user’s Lightning address ID and their counterpart’s host IP, create invoices and support recurring subscription payments between Peach users.
“Peach Commerce,” as Bitfury names its merchant LN plugin, will reportedly enable individual retailers and payment processors to add support for LN payments into their existing infrastructure for e-commerce services — the latter via a web-based Peach API.
The product will support BTC micropayments and allow for LN invoice management. Bitfury further claims its plugin can confirm payments “in seconds,” with scalability of up to thousands of transactions per second.
Lastly, Bitfury is also launching a point-of-sale hardware terminal to allow for fast and secure LN payments, as well as a “Peach public node” — the latter aiming to make payment channel creation easier by allowing users to connect their individual nodes or wallets to the public node.
As reported last month, the capacity of the Lightning Network has recently surpassed $2 million, despite the year-long bear market. As of Dec. 23, LN-supporting node channels were able to facilitate 496.8 BTC — worth about $2 million at the time.
Bitfury, for its part, is continuing to branch out into various industries — recently announcing the launch of a dedicated venture to open source the music industry using blockchain. Also this month, Bitfury partnered to bring LN payment support to Poland’s BTCBIT crypto exchange.
Cointelegraph recently published an analysis of the cryptocurrencies with the highest transaction speed capacities, noting that scalability remains an issue for blockchain-based assets.
