Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms by trading volume, said today that Coinbase would add the Bitcoin Lightning Network to its platform.
The news comes a month after the crypto executive had an affair with X co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Bitcoin Lightning Network, a layer-2) payment protocol layered on top of Bitcoin, solved slow transaction processing issues and was proposed to fix the scalability problem of the world's first-ever cryptocurrency asset, with major crypto exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance still not embracing the network, as community members speculation that incorporating it would decrease CEX's incentives for income.
On Wednesday, Coinbase announced that it is incorporating the Bitcoin Lightning Network to allow faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions on its platform.
The decision to incorporate lightning has been made by the company. We're excited to work to make Bitcoin the most valuable asset in crypto, and we're excited to contribute to faster/cheaper Bitcoin transactions. Will take some time to integration so please be patient, Armstrong said in a tweet.
The CEO's tweet came just after Coinbase Cloud protocol specialist Victor Bunin announced on the social media platform X he was leading the Bitcoin Lightning Network initiative and encouraged the community to offer their insights.
I'm happy to say that I'm leading up this effort. If you want to chat with Lightning support at Coinbase, send me a DM. Specially keen to get insights on lift to add support, UX flows, open source tooling, service providers, and edge cases. Thanks, protocol specialist, said he had no idea what he was talking about.
Armstrong's confirmation of the highly-anticipated integration came over a month after his public conversation with Dorsey, which took place on X in early August.
Armstrong denied the accusation, and confirms that Coinbase was considering integrating support for Bitcoin Lightning before assuring the Twitter co-founder that he would back Bitcoin Payments.
Dorsey responded by offering a partnership to Coinbase in this particular initiative and thanked the platform for its role in introducing Bitcoin to people.
Armstrong did not reveal if Dorsey has a hand in this integration.
The CEO of Coinbase had asked the community to be patient since the integration will take some time, so it failed to provide a timeline.
Bitcoin was up $16.171.88 on Wednesday, with a 24 hour trading volume down by 26.31% to $17.71 billion, a 0.50% increase in the past 24 hours and a 1.5% gain in the past seven days.
Bitcoin's value is up by 0.46% to a $510.19 billion market cap, based on the latest data from CoinMarketCap.