Xapo Bank Becomes First Bank To Offer Bitcoin Lightning Payments

Xapo is partnering with Lightspark to allow its customers to send bitcoin near-instantaneously to any vendor who accepts BTC over Lightning.

Gibraltar-licensed private bank Xapo Bank has partnered with Lightspark, the startup spearheaded by former Facebook crypto lead David Marcus, to integrate the Lightning Network and enable near-instant bitcoin payments for its customers. 

Xapo Bank members can now make small purchases of up to $100 USD at any vendor that accepts Lightning payments, without high transaction fees and long blockchain confirmation waiting times. This integration will make Xapo Bank the first fully licensed private bank to offer Lightning payments.

The Lightning Network enables scalable payments at millions of transactions per second across the network, reducing the time-consuming and costly experiences often faced by users who pay for small transactions in bitcoin.

Seamus Rocca, CEO of Xapo Bank, said in regards to the partnership, "By integrating with the hyper-efficient Lightning Network, we are the first bank in the world to streamline this process and allow our members to pay for small purchases with Bitcoin without having to convert to USD first." Rocca added that Xapo Bank offers an annual interest rate of 4.1% on US dollars and will soon be offering up to 1% on Bitcoin, to be paid out daily.

"We're thrilled to enable the first bank on the Lightning Network to offer instant, cheap Bitcoin payments to its customers,” said David Marcus, co-founder and CEO of Lightspark. “Xapo has been one of our early closed beta partners, and we're delighted they chose Lightspark's enterprise-grade solution to reliably send and receive payments on the Lightning Network without all the complexity and operational overhead that typically comes with running a node on it."

Xapo Bank members can pay via the Lightning Network by holding bitcoin in the Xapo Bank App and scanning and paying an invoice at any merchant that accepts Lightning payments.

The network charges a small fee for each transaction, and Xapo Bank has set a fixed payment fee for 15 sats to protect members from executing transactions with high fees.