Bitfury Rolls Out Lightning Peach, Its Own Suite of Lightning Tools

Bitfury’s new suite of Lightning products has been released to the public.

Lightning Peach, the title of the product bundle, was developed by Bitfury’s Lightning Network team of the same name. It includes a wallet, an e-commerce plug-in, a hardware component for a point-of-sale (PoS) terminal, a Lightning node for the new ecosystem and developer tools.

For starters, the open-source, cross-platform Peach wallet has all the bells and whistles of your usual Lightning wallet, “including: custom channel opening; the ability to send and receive on-chain and LN payments; and merchant discovery,” Pavel Prikhodko, head of Lightning Peach, told Bitcoin Magazine. Users can establish custom channels with a Lightning public address and the host IP of a peer, and the wallet also comes with a self-curated address book and an option to send recurring/subscription payments.

“We continue to investigate ways to streamline the user experience, and we soon plan to present an updated wallet that makes it even more simple for people to use,” Prikhodko continued.

Users can connect to Peach Node, Bitfury’s Lightning Network node, with their own nodes or wallets to create payment channels in the Peach ecosystem. Connected to this node, any user will be able to send payments to any other user on the network regardless if they already have an existing channel, while you can still send invoices for payments to wallets that aren’t connected to the node as well.

The suite’s two merchant components, Peach Commerce and Peach Terminal, are complementary tools built for e-commerce and PoS transactions.

Commerce can be integrated both as a PoS plug-in for merchants and as an API for payment processors to include in their backend. Asking Prikhodko what made the solution so “seamless,” as stated in the press release, he told me that it will automate the Lightning payments process to simplify it for the less technically inclined.

“The solution automatically handles channel capacity, connection with hubs and payment routing, and it integrates easily into existing e-commerce solutions, so the merchant doesn’t have to worry or even be aware of these things.”

Out the gate, the plugin will work with Prestashop, with WooCommerce and Magento soon to follow.

Terminal, Prikhodko said, was built with “broader wallet cross-compatibility in mind.” The hardware component can be integrated into the PoS systems for storefronts and even vending machines, and it supports connections through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mini HDMI and USB OTG ports.

After being asked what kind of flexibility the multiple avenues of connection would give the hardware, especially with Bluetooth, Prikhodko answered:

“A community-wide discussion is yet to happen around the best way forward to standardize the use of NFC and Bluetooth in the context of Lightning. However, Peach Terminal is using the standard Invoice Protocol as defined in the BOLT-11 specification. It’s our hope that more bitcoin wallet developers will follow our lead and enable NFC and Bluetooth Lightning payments in the nearest future.”

Bitfury’s Peach suite follows a year of rapid expansion and development for the Lightning Network. As the network’s bitcoin capacity and users grow by the day, developers from various labs and incubators continue to make headway on new applications, products and tools for its users. Prikhodko believes that merchants want to use a payment solution like Lightning for their business, if they have an easier way to do it, that is.

“Merchants want a new payment method if it provides fast and easy transactions that drive new customers. Lightning makes it easier for merchants to accept bitcoin by enabling instant payments and minimal transaction fees. The scalability that the Lightning Network enables is essential if we want more merchants to begin accepting bitcoin payments. The currently missing piece in the ecosystem is a merchant solution that hides all the operational complexity of the network behind a clean, user-friendly, and reliable merchant product that enables a new payment method and drives new business at no extra financial or behavioral cost.”