We have always been trying to be pioneers in the cryptocurrency space. We started the first Bitcoin ATM in Austria and launched the first Austrian web platform for bitcoin trading. Also, we developed Bitcoinbon, which is currently available at over 4.000 merchants across the country.

Our newest project also goes with this spirit. In our office in Graz we successfully executed a bitcoin transaction on the lightning network, which – as far as we know – was the first lightning transaction on a Bitcoin ATM worldwide.

What is the lightning network?

It’s a technology which is seen as a very promising solution for the scalability problem of bitcoin, although it is still in an early stage of development. It could potentially process millions of transactions each second, fast and almost without a fee.

Usually each bitcoin-transaction gets written directly in the blockchain. The lightning network works as a second-layer solution, participants are connected through payment channels and routes via multiple hops can be established on the lightning network.

A lightning transaction on a Bitcoin ATM

To get in touch with this new and promising technology, our CTO Daniel Weigl launched one of the first lightning full nodes. There currently are only a couple of hundred lightning full nodes, which are essential for the functionality of the network. Here is an overview of the current network.

The following video shows how this first lightning transaction has been executed at a Lamassu Bitcoin ATM in our office in Graz:



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To establish a connection to the lightning network, a payment channel was funded through this transaction. For this early demonstration, we purposely set a fixed amount of 50 Satoshi as the actual payment.

Even though the lightning network still is in an experimental stage, we made a big step towards mass suitability of bitcoin. The next months will be extremely exciting!