Effective immediately Lightning (mainnet) payments are accepted on Bitrefill.com

We’re proud to announce today that Lightning payments (mainnet, real bitcoins) are now publicly available on Bitrefill.com

Lightning network is a so-called “second layer technology” on top of Bitcoin allowing for payments to happen instantly and with almost zero fees. For our end users this means that they will not need to estimate transaction fees and not face the risk of having their payment stuck in unconfirmed state extended periods of time. For us as a company it means reduced risk in accepting 0-confirmation transactions, savings that we intend to pass on to our customers making our service even cheaper to use.

At the time of writing there is no GUI wallet released for mainnet payments, but we’re anticipating mainnet release of several wallets shortly. For the time being, command-line savvy users and developers are welcome to use our services already, to either refill prepaid phones in any of our 163 supported countries, or to buy vouchers for services like Steam and Viber.

To make a Lightning payment on Bitrefill just visit www.bitrefill.com, place your order as usual, and at the payment step select “Lightning”

A lightning payment looks very similar to a Bitcoin payment. Just copy the invoice address or scan the QR code and that’s it!

If you as a user want to open your first Lightning channel directly to our node you can do so, just connect to our node per the instructions below. Of course you can just as well pay through any of the many nodes that are already connected to us.

lncli connect 030c3f19d742ca294a55c00376b3b355c3c90d61c6b6b39554dbc7ac19b141c14f@52.50.244.44:9735

At Bitrefill our vision is and has always been to enable everyday use of cryptocurrency as money, for people all over the world. We’re incredibly excited to be part of the first wave of this potentially revolutionary technology. We’re by no means finished though, and are eager to soon share with you what else we’ve been working on.