While thunderstorms after another rage over southern Germany, the Lightning network continues to expand. There has been overwhelming news from the Offchain network in recent weeks. We introduce the five most important of them — and are impressed.

1. CoinGate: First payment provider will soon integrate Lightning

CoinGate is a crypto payment service provider based in Vilnius, Lithuania. In addition to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash, the company accepts more than fifty additional cryptocurrencies. In March, CoinGate announced a partnership with PrestaShop , a popular open source shopware, to bring crypto payments into the shops that use this software. In total, CoinGate has processed more than 200,000 payments , of which just over 100,000 will fall on the first half of 2018 alone.

The Lithuanian company has good cards to compete with established payment service providers such as BitPay. An important stop on this path could be the integration of Lightning. About four weeks ago, CoinGate released Lightning payments in the test shop. After about 500 successful transactions , the company is now preparing the integration of Lightning in the real payments. If you want to be one of the first to bring it to your shop, you can register on this form.

2. Lamassu: Lightning payments for ATMs are expected to go live in the coming weeks

Although there is no official announcement from Lamassu, one of the largest manufacturers of Bitcoin machines, but at least a tweet: The company expects to bring in the coming weeks Lightning payments in its software for the machines.

The significance of this message can hardly be overestimated. Because Bitcoin machines are one of the few occasions where real-time transactions are very important, but the existing opportunities to secure unconfirmed transactions are insufficient. There is a real benefit for the customers who use Lightning.

By the way, before Lamassu, Coinfinity made an attempt to bring Lightning into an ATM.

3. Satoshis.Place: Paint with Lightning

If you want to test Lightning payments, take a look at Satoshis.Place. Here you can put a pixel on a canvas against payment by a Satoshi. Thanks to Lightning, such payments are possible. Of course, in order to draw, you do not have to do a Lightning transaction per pixel, but you can draw first and then pay for the pixels as a package.

The action emulates Reddit-Place. While in the earliest days of Satoshis.Place it was still necessary to ask whether the Lightning fans identify themselves mainly with Penise and the aversion to Roger Ver, Bitcoin Cash and Vitalik Buterin, the level of the screen has increased in the last two days clearly improved.

In the end, it’s not about creating something — it’s about experimenting. New technologies are almost always developed by playing with them.

4. Atomic Swaps: Exchange Union trades Lightning Bitcoins for Litecoins

The “ Exchange Union “ wants to build a decentralized marketplace where various cryptocurrencies are exchanged for so-called “atomic swaps”. In this case, transactions are formed so that there are only two results — either takes place an exchange, or nothing happens. By running these transactions through Lightning — or not executing them — you can, for example, swap Bitcoin for Litecoin without the exchange directly touching the blockchain. Only the two involved Lightning nodes exchange information offchain.

Now Exchange Union has formed the first Atomic Swap between Bitcoin and Litecoin. This is still beta, on an old code base, and in real life, later, the swaps will be structured differently — but it’s further proof that it works. The whole thing is pretty promising. Not only because it allows you to build decentralized exchanges — you could also switch Bitcoin on the Lightning network to other coins (or sidechain tokens) that have other properties, such as other smart contracts, to allow the range of possible operations on Lightning expand.

5. Joltfun: Steam games for Lightning

In the end, we come back to the old wisdom that nothing on the Internet can scold money, so you can not buy Steam games. At Joltfun, you can now pay your Steam Keys with Bitcoin — through both normal and Lightning transactions.