Bitso rolls out Lightning Network support for 8m users

Bitso, a leading crypto exchange in Latin America, has rolled out Lightning Network support for 100% of its users.

On Nov. 12, the Lightspark team posted on X that the South American crypto exchange Bitso has now added support for Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network support for all its users. This milestone for the South American crypto exchange comes as BTC’s price surges amid increased adoption. BTC was trading near $89,894 at the time of writing, up 28% over the past week.

BTC traded near $89,894 at the time of writing, up 28% in the past week.

The development follows a partnership between Bitso and Lightspark in June, with Bitso leveraging Lightspark’s Lightning Network infrastructure to offer faster and cheaper BTC transactions to its growing user base.

According to Lightspark, this feature is now accessible to more than 8 million retail users. Bitso customers across Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico can now conduct near-instant Bitcoin transactions through the layer-2 network.

Bitso launched in April 2014, hitting the crypto market as the first cryptocurrency exchange in Mexico. The exchange surpassed the one million customer mark in 2020, and hit expansion milestones with entry into Argentina and Brazil. In 2021, Bitso became Latin America’s first crypto unicorn, before going on to launch its international payments service in 2023.

Meanwhile, David Marcus, the former payments and crypto product lead at Facebook, announced the launch of Lightspark in May 2022. The ex-PayPal executive, who also started the Libra project in 2018, noted in the Lightspark launch announcement that the new company would focus on exploring, building and extending the capabilities of Bitcoin.

Lightspark is backed by top venture capital firms, including a16z Crypto, Paradigm, Coatue and Ribbit Capital.