Binance team communicated in a late Sunday blog post that its exchange platform has integrated with Bitcoin on the Lightning Network after previously teasing the plans as imminent in May. The integration, which has officially been in the pipeline since June 20, means the exchange now supports BTC deposits and withdrawals on the layer-2 scaling network.
Binance’s decision to onboard the Lightning Network comes on the back of a swell in transaction fees and network congestion issues in May owing to the popularity and increased activity around meme-coins on Bitcoin made possible by the BRC-20 token standard. Several other exchanges and companies in the crypto space have, in recent years, explored Lightning Network applications, including Bitfinex, OKX, and Kraken.
Earlier this month, the team behind Lightning Network, Lightning Labs, released a set of developer tools to integrate LN with AI. The tools, built on the Langchain library and the L402 protocol standard for payment-metered APIs, will allow developers to build better AI infrastructure for humans and agents.
Block’s crypto-focused unit TBD revealed in March that it would be deploying part of its crypto holdings to support the Lightning Network through a service “c=” that will see a portion of its Bitcoin reserves stored on the Lightning Network. The move essentially made the Jack Dorsey-led company the network’s liquidity provider. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also said in an April 8 tweet that the exchange planned to integrate the same but didn’t provide a timeline.
Last December a Twitter Spaces event, MicroStrategy executive chairman Michael Saylor hinted at the company’s plans to deliver Bitcoin Lightning Network-powered solutions at some point this year. In April, Saylor confirmed integrating the Bitcoin Lightning address into his corporate email through the Lightning Address protocol. The protocol allows users to send BTC over the LN to other users with similarly integrated email addresses.
