One of the big ways that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been adopted as a mainstream use case has been in the retail industry. While there are still only a select group of companies that are setup to accept digital assets, big names are helping to spread the word. OpenNode has commented on these situations by saying that the cost of Bitcoin acceptance could be offset with a 1% fee for their use. The new Shopify Lightning Network plugin targets merchants, helping them to find potential solutions for monetization and scalability.

The platform is simple, providing support for eCommerce with new payment infrastructure APIs for developers, and the company offers fast payment processing limits, resulting in instant settlements. Optimally, the goal is that this plugin will help with more widespread acceptance and adoption of Bitcoin across multiple merchants, which means more retail investors will enter the space too.

Another benefit is that “merchants love Shopify,” as Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lütke says. The platform has a welcoming environment that lets anyone sell at any time and takes on much of the factors that contribute to the functioning of a retail business in general. In the first quarter of last year, the company say a 68% year over year increase.

The plugin is specifically for merchants on Shopify, which can be integrated by going to the Settings tab of the merchant OpenNode dashboard. There is a guide already available to make the plugin run correctly. With so many merchants already accepting Bitcoin on the website, this is an opportunity to join the trend.

OpenNode believes that Bitcoin should be available to everyone, since it is the latest global “hard” money. Rather than allowing consumers to simply sit around and hold their funds, spending their holding will help to stir up the market. Bitcoin has the benefit of being used as a medium of exchange and store of value, but it also is a settlement system that is highly secure. The Lightning Network has helped with the scaling concerns but have not sacrificed security in the process. Buyers do not have to worry about charge-backs or low fees because of the Lightning Network and OpenNode.

Now, all of these benefits are helpful if the plugin does what it says it will do. However, after the plugin was announced in a post on Reddit, it looks like there is no access to the Hosted Payment SDK, which basically means that there’s no new payment integrations that Shopify plans to accept.

Further comments have yet to be posted about the attempts to implement the OpenNode plugin on Reddit. Neither Shopify nor OpenNode has commented on the implementation on Twitter or has even officially announced it. So far, Ethereum World News has been the leading publication to release this information.