On November 5, 2019, Bitcoin-focused product hub Coin Ninja announced that, through a collaboration with cryptocurrency payments company Wyre, users can now buy bitcoin directly on the DropBit app with Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Coin Ninja calls DropBit its “Venmo for bitcoin,” a bitcoin wallet and payment service particularly designed to help Bitcoiners send BTC to those who don’t own any. And it positioned this announcement as progress in its efforts to make DropBit the fastest and easiest on-ramp for bitcoin.

Coin Ninja claimed that bitcoin purchases can take less than two minutes from installation to completion and that the integration is easy for even nontechnical users to leverage. It also noted a purchasing cap of $500 worth of bitcoin and that purchased bitcoin loads directly into a DropBit wallet.

The announcement also highlighted that there are no KYC requirements for using the new feature (though using Apple Pay or Google Pay would presumably mean that a purchaser has already provided this information).

DropBit Lightning Support

DropBit has been undergoing major upgrades over the past several months. In October 2019, the wallet added support for the Lightning Network, allowing users to conveniently send low-fee micropayments even to those who do not have wallets set up on the Lightning Network proper.

“The DropBit wallet is about sending frequent, smaller Bitcoin transactions in the easiest way possible,” Kyle Stalzer, head of product at Coin Ninja, told Bitcoin Magazine at the time. “You don’t need a long abstract wallet address — you simply need someone’s phone number or Twitter handle to send — even if the recipient has never owned bitcoin previously.”

This most recent announcement added that, in addition to the added ability to buy bitcoin, DropBit “just recently released version 3.0 with a locked preview of Lightning Network for all users.” The company will be offering ways for users to receive full, unlocked functionality over the next several days via its Twitter profile.