It is better late than never.
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, a 2nd layer off-chain transaction network to facilitate faster payments, received its first significant adoption news from a major exchange after Bitfinex announced its support for the scaling solution.
According to a press release received by AMBcrypto, the exchange has announced that it would be facilitating Lightning Network deposits and withdrawals from 3 December. With the implementation of Lightning Network, users will also be able to deposit Bitcoin on the exchange directly at a faster rate.
Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex, stated,
“As one of the most advanced cryptocurrency exchange, we’re committed to growing the Lightning Network on our platform to boost Bitcoin’s competitiveness as a means of payment, bringing Bitcoin ever closer to achieving mass adoption. More innovative services will be added to our Lightning Network node in the near future to provide even more benefits and convenience for our users and the wider cryptocurrency ecosystem.”
After the announcement, Ardoino also discussed the decision behind implementing Bitcoin’s Lightning Network on the exchange, in an interview with a media outlet.
Addressing the scaling solution, Ardoino commented that Lightning is one of the best options in the market to send and receive Bitcoins in the ecosystem. According to Ardoino, the 2nd layer payment system made sense from a technical point of view, as well as from a perspective of solving the scalability issues of Bitcoin. He said,
“I am really happy for Bitfinex to the first exchange to do that, and to prove that this can actually work.”
As previously mentioned, Bitfinex is the first exchange to offer support for the Lightning network and according to the CTO of the exchange, other exchanges have been coy due to the substantial security risks associated with it. He stated that any cryptocurrency exchange cannot allow numeral threats to hover over the user’s assets, adding that the LN protocol did not tackle these issues earlier.
However, he believes that the digital asset industry is moving at a rapid pace and exchanges need to take a bit more risk to facilitate faster transactions. Ardoino also claimed that they have to develop the implementation step by step, in order to avoid any major loopholes in the new payments system.
