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- Coinbase CEO told Jack Dorsey that they aren’t ignoring Bitcoin Lightning Network but exploring ways to integrate it.
- Dorsey proposed to Armstrong the idea of collaborating on an open protocol for money transfers.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey engaged in an interesting discussion on Twitter discussing the potential and the future of Bitcoin’s Layer-2 scalability platform – The Lightning Network. This is one more testament to the fact that the top industry leaders are showing a growing interest in Bitcoin Lightning solutions.
Jack Dorsey started the talk by asking why Coinbase wasn’t paying much attention to Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Dorsey was basically responding to a tweet from Armstrong, where the Coinbase CEO talks about the next mission of introducing instant crypto payments.
Why do you continue to ignore bitcoin and lightning?
what "crypto" is a better money transmission protocol and why?
— jack (@jack) July 26, 2023
Armstrong replied, saying that Coinbase is thinking about how to integrate the Lightning Network, which is not an easy task but is important. He also highlighted Coinbase’s strong dedication to Bitcoin, stating that the company has introduced more people to Bitcoin than maybe any other. “Let’s build it together,” noted Armstrong.
Dorsey praised Coinbase for its role in spreading Bitcoin and suggested that they should invest more in Bitcoin and Layer-2 technologies. He also proposed the idea of collaborating on an open protocol for money transfers that wouldn’t be controlled by a single entity.
On the other hand, Binance has already announced the integration of the Lightning Network to handle potential spikes in base-layer fees in the future. Despite requests from prominent Bitcoin supporters like Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy, Coinbase has not yet disclosed any similar plans.
Top Industry Players Working on Bitcoin Lightning
Some of the top industry players have already started working on Bitcoin Lightning solutions. The Lightning Network is like a special addition to Bitcoin that helps it handle lots of transactions faster and with very low fees. The Layer-2 Lightning Network rests atop the Bitcoin blockchain mainnet and makes transactions almost instant and almost free. Recently, when there were many Bitcoin-based meme coins in May, Binance had high transaction costs and slow withdrawals. So, people became more interested in this Lightning Network technology.
On the other hand, Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block Inc. has also been working on integrating Lightning solutions at their end. Spiral, a company under Dorsey’s ownership, has developed tools to help developers easily add the Lightning Network to their apps. Even CashApp, their popular payment service, now uses the Lightning Network.
On the other hand, the world’s largest corporate holder of Bitcoins – MicroStrategy – has also doubled down its efforts on introducing Lightning capabilities to their company. In December, Saylor mentioned that MicroStrategy is looking into software and solutions that use the Lightning Network (LN). They are exploring options for enterprise marketing and a cybersecurity solution for corporate websites.
In April of this year, the billionaire also integrated Bitcoin’s Lightning Network into his corporate email address. This means that people can now send BTC to Saylor using his company email address as a way to identify him.
