- Kraken has built-in Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.
- Customers can now deposit and withdraw up to 0.1 BTC with prompt and low-cost Lightning funds.
- Kraken is operating an LND Lightning node.
Cryptocurrency trade Kraken now helps Bitcoin’s Lightning Network for cheap and prompt buyer deposits and withdrawals of BTC, the corporate stated in a press release despatched to Bitcoin Magazine.
“Adoption is going to come from people who have fiat in their bank account, and they need to get it into Bitcoin,” Pierre Rochard, Bitcoin product supervisor at Kraken, informed Bitcoin Magazine. “Kraken is providing an excellent venue for them to do that, and then they can top up their mobile Lightning wallet and use it as a medium of exchange. That’s clearly the next step in terms of Bitcoin’s evolution.”
Kraken joined the Lightning Network with its own Lightning node. The firm stated all of its purchasers can now use the brand new integration, which permits deposits and withdrawals of up to 0.1 BTC, or 10 million satoshis, per switch.
“Lightning is a lot more efficient than on-chain Bitcoin while also still relying on on-chain Bitcoin’s security, so it really is the best of both worlds,” Rochard stated.
Lightning allows low-cost and quick bitcoin transactions by leveraging sensible contracts to summary small and frequent funds away from the Bitcoin community base layer. That abstraction happens within the type of cost channels, wherein customers lock up bitcoin on-chain by creating 2-of-2 multisig addresses, which they can then use to switch funds to each other off-chain.
“With Lightning, you can send a payment off-chain that is much more energy efficient, not only because you’re not adding the miner fees, and thus the amount of electricity consumption by miners, but also because that payment only has to be stored and shared by the two parties in that channel,” Rochard stated.
Lightning therefore scales the Bitcoin blockchain as a second layer and empowers BTC to be higher used as a medium of trade by establishing an overlay community of cost channels not directly linked with one another that may theoretically carry out tens of millions of transactions per second as bitcoin is routed throughout channels from sender to recipient.
Kraken leveraged Lightning Labs’ node implementation, LND, due to the API interface it exposes and the intensive developer documentation the challenge makes obtainable, Rochard stated.
“It has been a really great experience because they do have a fully featured API and they are one of the oldest implementations of the Lightning protocol,” Rochard stated. “They have the largest user base and we have a lot of people on the network that have lots of experience with LND. So it has proven to be easy to use and very reliable as well.”
