Announcing Lightning on Purse

Purse proudly announces that the Lightning Network is coming to the Marketplace! As a result, Shoppers and Earners can access instant transactions while paying lower fees. Purse is beta testing our Lightning Network integration and expects to launch to all Shoppers & Earners within a month.

Please APPLY HERE if you’d like to participate as a beta tester to get early access to Lightning.

Lightning’s Use Case

Satoshi envisioned Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system when he announced the project over a decade ago.

Bitcoin’s capability as a medium-of-exchange (MoE) is capped by an arbitrary block size limit causing bottlenecks that increase network costs. As a result, Bitcoiners paid anywhere from $0.47 to $62.79 per transaction in the last five years.

Subsequently, the average time to complete a bitcoin transaction fluctuates from around 10 minutes upwards to hours and even days.

Lightning’s Solution

Cryptocurrency protocols face a tradeoff between decentralization and cheaper, faster transactions. While it’s possible to increase the block size to achieve a Visa-scale of 47,000 transactions per second, only a handful of institutions could fully validate the records as the technical requirement would be 8 gigabytes per bitcoin block or 400 terabytes of data per year.

This approach causes centralization.

To combat this, Lightning Network was introduced by Joseph Poon & Tadge Dryja in 2015 to make Bitcoin accessible to billions of people without compromising on decentralization. Lightning Users can send cheap, instant transactions without counterparty risk by creating a network of micropayment channels off-chain using bitcoin scripting opcodes.

So why has it taken so long to implement the Lightning Network?

1. This approach is much more complex than increasing the block size limit.
2. 2nd Layer network effects are required to create liquidity.

Thus, it took three years after the whitepaper before Lightning Network implementations were mature enough for adventurous users to start using them and another four years until the network was mature enough for institutions to begin experimenting with them.

Today, the Lightning Network has seen more than 83,400 unique channels opened, 20,000 operational nodes, and at least 4,000 BTC are currently liquid on the network.

Why Lightning on Purse?

Lightning helps our mission to “Make Crypto Useful” through cheap, instant BTC transactions for Shoppers & Earners. Further, we believe continued development on the Lightning Network, including projects like Taro, will move Purse to a more decentralized and self-custodial future.

Thanks again for the continued support, and we look forward to Lightning with you!