100 Merchants Can Now Trial Bitcoin's Lightning Network Risk Free

A few lucky merchants now have one less obstacle to accepting bitcoin payments via the Lightning Network.

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, payment processing startup CoinGate is opening up a pilot program that will allow 100 merchants to trial a Lightning-enabled version of its service, one which taps into the open-source tech meant to make bitcoin transactions fast and cheap.

Although Lightning invoices are typically limited by the protocol itself to 0.042 bitcoin each, or under $300 according to current prices, CoinGate CCO Vilius Semenas told CoinDesk there's no established limit to how many invoices CoinGate will reimburse if funds are lost.

This pilot could test whether Lightning actually tackles some of the issues that deter mainstream merchants from prioritizing crypto payments in the first place.

"Instant payments are the most important from our point of view," Tamás Szerencse, head of payments at LiveJasmin, said, expanding on why the company joined CoinGate's Lightning pilot.

With up to 40 million daily visitors, LiveJasmin could become one of the biggest mainstream merchants to experiment with Lightning so far.

Still, most acknowledge there's still a long way to go until mainstream merchants could safely use Lightning.

The majority of merchants who applied for this pilot were businesses like collectibles maker Bitgild, which offers silver and gold coins engraved with QR codes for real cryptocurrency, catering to clients who are already fascinated by Lightning experiments.

Lightning's most useful features for merchants are still in development.

"In the future, one nice thing about Lightning merchants is that if they invoice you in one currency and the payer wants to pay in a different currency, that will be possible."