Bitso rolls out Lightning Network support for 8m users

Bitso, one of Latin America’s leading crypto exchanges, offered Lightning Network support for 100% of its users.

On November 12, the Lightspark team announced on X that South American crypto exchange Bitso has now added Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network support for all its users. This milestone for the South American crypto exchange comes as the price of BTC rises with increasing adoption. At the time of writing, BTC was trading around $89,894, up 28% last week.

At the time of writing, BTC was trading around $89,894, up 28% last week.

This development follows the partnership between Bitso and Lightspark in June; Bitso uses Lightspark’s Lightning Network infrastructure to offer faster and cheaper BTC transactions to its growing user base.

According to Lightspark, this feature is now accessible to more than 8 million retail users. Bitso customers in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico can now conduct Bitcoin transactions almost instantly over the layer 2 network.

Bitso launched in April 2014, entering the crypto market as the first cryptocurrency exchange in Mexico. The exchange surpassed the one million customer mark in 2020 and reached expansion milestones with entry into Argentina and Brazil. Bitso became Latin America’s first crypto unicorn in 2021 and will go on to launch its international payment service in 2023.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s former payments and crypto products lead, David Marcus, announced the launch of Lightspark in May 2022. The former PayPal executive, who also launched the Libra project in 2018, stated in the Lightspark launch announcement that the new company will continue this project. Focus on exploring, building and expanding Bitcoin’s capabilities.

Lightspark is backed by leading venture capital firms including a16z Crypto, Paradigm, Coatue and Ribbit Capital.