Bitcoin Major News: POS Giant Begins Lightning Experiment

The mainstream adoption of Bitcoin — not only as a store of value but also as a means of payment — has taken a huge step forward today. As CEO of Strike Jack Mallers announce Via Twitter, the Bitcoin Lightning Network went live yesterday with Clover.

On Twitter, Mallers announced that Strike is now a full partner with payments giant Fiserv, Clover’s parent company. As a result, Strike has launched an experimental integration with Clover that will allow merchants to accept Bitcoin payments through the Lightning Network.

Strike is officially a full partner of payments giant Fiserv and we’ve launched our public beta program with Clover POS terminals! Clover merchants can now accept cheaper, faster, cash-end US dollars in exchange for Lightning.

As Mallers explained, this is not an integration of his own company Strike, but the Lightning Network. “Anyone can use any service to pay at any enabled merchant. From a Cash app to a node via Tor. If it can make a Lightning payment, you can use it,” Strike’s CEO said.

Initially, this is a 90-day trial phase. Starting immediately, any Clover merchant interested in enabling payments via Lightning can. This means that not all Clover merchants will be automatically enabled.

Instead, during the testing phase, partners will measure and track settlement speed and cost compared to other networks. After the beta phase, the Bitcoin Lightning integration will be published in the Clover App Store and will be directly integrated into Clover.

“This will enable Lightning as the accepted payment network for all Clover merchants by default, sitting next to card networks like Visa and MasterCard,” Mallers announced and further stated:

Ultimately, these payment giants want to see Lightning in action. They want to feel it, touch it, and see people use it. An open, instant, cheap, inclusive and innovative payment network that sounds too good to be true. It’s time to show Lightning is the world’s best payments railroad.

Yu.

Lightning is alive with clover.

Strike is officially a full partner of the payments giant @employee We have launched a public beta with @employee POS terminals!

Clover merchants can now accept cheaper, faster, cash-end US dollars in exchange for Lightning.

🚀⚡️🍀 pic.twitter.com/o1GQg1xw5o

– Jack Mallers (@jackmallers) January 26, 2023

Why is this huge news for bitcoin adoption?

The Lightning Network is central to the adoption of Bitcoin as a method of payment, and Strike’s initiatives play an important role.

While Cash has already integrated the Lightning Network, Mallers announced a slew of solid partnerships at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, including integrations with e-commerce giant Shopify and with NCR, the world’s largest point-of-sale system provider, as well as payments company Blackhawk. .

But Mallers’ announcement today of the partnership with Fiserv and Clover is a little less significant. Fiserv’s parent company is included in the S&P 500 stock index and the NASDAQ-100 stock index.

Clover is a cloud-based Point of Sale (POS) platform for Android launched in April 2012 and has an impressive annual total payment volume of $233 billion. As promoted by Mallers, Bitcoin Lightning can compete alongside Visa and Mastercard for this transaction volume.

At the time of publication, the BTC price is at $22,965, marking a slight 0.1% decrease in the price over the past 24 hours.

Featured image by Vadim Artyukhin/Unsplash, chart from TradingView.com