Former Meta, PayPal executive building payment solution on Bitcoin Lightning Network

David Marcus, an executive whose past stints include working at Meta, formerly Facebook—a company that is using technology to connect people and bring the metaverse to life; and PayPal, an online payment system, is now building a payment solution that leverages the Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN).

Former Meta, PayPal executives building on the Bitcoin Lightning Network

In a recent interview, Marcus, who was heavily involved in Facebook’s cryptocurrency project Libra, which was later rebranded to Diem and abandoned altogether, said he knew about Bitcoin and even read the platform’s whitepaper when it was first released. 

Thirteen years later, Marcus is the CEO of Lightspark, an open payment system anchored on the Bitcoin Lighting Network. The platform claims its solution will facilitate payment at the “speed of light” via an enterprise-grade gateway that businesses can leverage.

The Lightning Network is a layer-2 solution that aims to scale Bitcoin by routing transactions via Offchain channels. In this way, not only can the platform process more transactions but also users can send transactions cheaply. Most importantly, unlike in the Bitcoin mainnet, where users can wait 20 to 30 minutes for transaction confirmation, the Lightning Network allows instant settlement.

Using the Lightning Network’s features, Lightspark has released Lightspark Connect, enabling fast settlement of transactions and Lightspark Predict for capital-efficient and reliable payments. At the same time, the platform has the Lightspark SDK wallet, which allows users to store Bitcoin and transact securely in the Lightning Network while having full control of their funds. 

Lightning Network has issues that are being resolved

Still, during the interview, Marcus acknowledged that the Lightning Network still has issues that it needs to address. Through its platform, Lightspark is building tools so users, including businesses, can use the Lightning Network to resolve payment challenges. 

Lightspark Predict, for instance, identifies the best-performing Lightning Network nodes and routes transactions through them. Accordingly, Lightspark alleviates worries for users who still doubt the amount of liquidity on the Bitcoin layer-2.

“Lightning still has issues, but I feel very confident that we can address these issues. You’ll see that for companies to integrate Lightning using Lightspark services, you don’t need to worry about channels. You don’t need to worry about liquidity. You don’t need to worry about channel rebalancing and distributing liquidity. You don’t need to worry about what routes you will use and which minimum fee or maximum fee you will set.

As of June 10, the Bitcoin Lightning Network had a capacity of $138,026,349.10, up 1% on the last day. 

Meanwhile, 16,443 nodes are enabling 71,065 channels to move bitcoin transactions cheaply.