Twitter is making waves in the crypto community after teasing a plan to integrate Bitcoin.
Twitter’s product lead, Kayvon Beykpour, affirms the company is focused on bringing Bitcoin’s Lightning Network to the social media platform.
The Lightning Network, developed by software developer Lightning Labs, offers a potential scaling solution for Bitcoin, allowing it to process vastly more transactions per second as opposed to the main blockchain’s five transactions per second.
Bitcoin payments on the Lightning Network would allow users to send money to others on the network as part of Twitter’s Tip Jar program that began testing earlier this year. Users could drop off small amounts of money into one’s “tip jar” without having to know the individual or exchange payment information.
Currently, Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal, and Venmo are the only available payment methods on the beta test. However, users will soon be able to link Bitcoin addresses to their profiles as well.
In order to enable the Lightning Network on its platform, Twitter is teaming up with global payments company Strike, who in May partnered with the nation of El Salvador to develop infrastructure and support Bitcoin as a legal tender.
Many have pointed out that not all regions of the world have access to Strike, an example being Africa. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded by suggesting that Strike could be coming to Africa with future partnerships soon.
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