IT’S LIVE! Coinbase Integration of Bitcoin Lightning Powered by Lightspark

Today, we’re thrilled to share that Coinbase is rolling out support for the Lightning Network powered by Lightspark. 

We spent a lot of time testing behind the scenes to ensure the integration was ready for the hundreds of millions of people in 100+ countries who will have access to Lightning payments once the rollout is completed. Seeing our efforts come to life with real-world use cases at such a large scale is tremendously satisfying. 

We’re delighted to be part of bringing one of our industry’s most impactful and significant companies to Lightning at the perfect time. Until now, Bitcoin transfers on Coinbase have been processed on chain, which could take anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours and be costly. With this integration, Coinbase customers can instantly send, receive, or pay with Bitcoin on Lightning directly from their Coinbase account and benefit from fast, cheaper transfers.

Try Lightning payments out in your Coinbase app, or learn more here.

The Technology 

Coinbase is using Lightspark’s remote-key signing implementation – with the Lightning signing keys entirely held by Coinbase, while Lightspark hosts their Lightning node. This integration allows Coinbase to benefit from a scalable, reliable, and fully optimized node infrastructure that provides a deep suite of functionality through a simple and intuitive interface. Product, engineering, and operations teams at Coinbase can focus on creating the very best end-to-end experiences for their customers without the distraction that comes from the complexities of managing and optimizing a large-scale Lightning implementation.

Lightspark integrations will pave the way for additional payment use cases in the near future by allowing more liquidity to be converted in and out of Bitcoin from fiat and cryptocurrencies. We’re excited to be well-positioned to contribute to bringing Lightning to Coinbase. 

At Lightspark, we’ve been working incredibly hard for almost two years to build our platform as the best enterprise-grade high-performance solution for Lightning. Our software and services allow the most demanding institutions - like Coinbase - to reliably tap into the Lightning network to enable near real-time, low-cost Bitcoin transactions.