According to Lightspark, the Coinbase integration will divert more transaction activity off the Bitcoin base layer, where fees have risen significantly in the past 12 months. With the announcement of a new collaboration with Lightspark, an enterprise-focused Lightning solution run by former PayPal president David Marcus, Coinbase is getting closer to incorporating Bitcoin Lightning on its platform. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, stated in an April 4 X post that the company will integrate the Bitcoin layer-2 network “soon,” enabling its 108 million users to take advantage of possibly quicker and less expensive Bitcoin transactions.
Lightspark Says They Are “Lighting Up” All Coinbase Touchpoints
According to Lightspark’s April 3 article, “Lighting up all Coinbase touchpoints with Lightning” would shift more transaction activity to Bitcoin’s second layer, therefore countering the recent surge in fees on Bitcoin’s base layer. In September of last year, Armstrong stated that they would incorporate Bitcoin Lightning; however, he did not elaborate on the specifics of when or how this would happen. Since its founding in 2022, Lightspark has focused a large portion of its efforts on simplifying the setup and upkeep of Lightning nodes to successfully send and receive transactions. To optimize liquidity requirements and routing in real time to enhance transaction success rates and finality times, the company also developed Lightspark Predict, an AI-based smart engine.
