Nubank brings Bitcoin Lightning to its 100M Latin American customers
Brazilian neobank Nubank has partnered with payments platform Lightspark to offer the Bitcoin Lightning Network to 100 million customers in Latin America.
LightSpark said on June 25 that Lightning is working with Nubank to begin “integration, mapping and building potential products” and will have “a lot to share in the future.”
Lightspark also integrates the Universal Money Address Standard – a payment system built on Lightning that allows users to send money to an email-like address.
The merger is part of NewBank's plan to offer high-speed, low-cost transfers via blockchain, NewBank's chief crypto officer Tomasz Fortes said in a statement.
Since it was co-founded in 2022 by former PayPal President David Marcus, Lightspark has been building lightning network infrastructure for enterprises.
Lightspark said the Nubank integration is a “significant milestone” for the Lightning network, as it will significantly impact overall network utilization when it is most needed.
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Nubank is backed by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway and allows trading of 14 cryptocurrencies. In November, it partnered with Stability Coins to expand access to the US dollar coin (USDC).
His crypto services went public in May 2022, announcing that it would allocate 1% of its net assets to Bitcoin.
About 92 million Nubank customers are based in Brazil, with the remaining 8 million located mostly in Mexico and Colombia.
The majority of cryptocurrency trading volume is facilitated in Brazilian real trading pairs, followed by Mexican, Argentine and Colombian pesos, according to data from Caico Research.
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