There is some great news for Litecoin enthusiasts. CoinGate has extended support to Litecoin, widely referred to as LTC, Lightning Network payments as per its official announcement in the previous week. That means users will now be able to make payments more quickly and cheaply, thanks to this latest development.
CoinGate is a payment gateway company based in Lithuania which facilitates blockchain payments. Since it has included Lightning Network on its platform, over 4,500 merchants presently utilizing the CoinGate platform will start accepting the LTC Lightning Network payments.
4,500+ Merchants Now Accept Litecoin Lightning Network Payments.⚡️$ltc $btc #crypto @CoinGatecom https://t.co/wAlmWIPVoe
— Litecoin.com (@LitecoinDotCom) February 9, 2019
The Litecoin Foundation stated through its additional blog post that CoinGate was actively testing the Lightning Network on its platform for a certain period with SurfShark, a merchant partner as well as a virtual private network provider. The post also revealed that it was only after the successful completion of this test period that the company decided to go ahead with the inclusion of LTC payments officially.
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In the previous year, the payment gateway company had introduced a fully integrated payment system for bitcoin and was visibly excited about the progress. In its official statement, CoinGate said,
“Since the launch, we saw over 30,000 created orders to pay with Lightning which suffice as a strong sign that both our customers and the crypto community have a keen interest in this development. Seeing the huge potential it has, we decided to keep developing the feature, but this time, for Litecoin.”
Litecoin’s blog post also reminded about the public bet made between bitcoin.com’s CEO Roger Ver and Litecoin’s founder Charlie Lee 4 months ago. The bet had Roger confidently saying that within the timeframe of next 18 months, Litecoin would not be able to get Lightning Network payment acceptance from even a thousand merchants. However, with this evolution, Roger has completely lost the bet. Now he is supposed to wear the t-shirt of the Lightning Network and accept that it was him who was wrong (as per the bet).
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While we are writing this post, latest 1ML data notes that the LTC Lightning Network at present has 140 nodes, 798 channels and network capacity of 96.55 LTC.
