POS Giant Starts Lightning Trial

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Bitcoin’s adoption into the mainstream – not only as a store of value but also as a means of payment – took a big step forward today. As Strike CEO Jack Mallers announced via Twitter, the Bitcoin Lightning Network went live yesterday with Clover.

On Twitter, Mallers announced that Strike is now an integrated partner with payments giant Fiserv, Clover’s parent company. As a result, Strike has launched a pilot integration with Clover that will allow merchants to accept Bitcoin payments through the Lightning Network.

Strike is officially an integrated partner of the payments giant Fiserv and we’ve launched our public pilot with Clover point-of-sale terminals! Clover merchants can now accept cheaper, faster, cash-final USD over Lightning.

As Mallers explained, this is not an integration of his own company Strike, but of the Lightning Network. “Anyone can use any service to checkout at any enabled merchant. From Cash App to a node over Tor. If it can make a Lightning payment, you can use it,” the Strike CEO said.

Initially, this is a 90-day pilot phase. Starting immediately, any Clover merchant who is interested can enable payments via Lightning. This means that not all Clover merchants will be automatically enabled.

Instead, during the test phase, partners will measure and track settlement speed and cost compared to the other networks. After the pilot phase, the Bitcoin Lightning integration will be rolled out to the Clover App Store and it will be integrated directly into Clover.

“This would enable Lightning as an accepted payment network for all Clover merchants by default, sitting next to card networks like Visa and MasterCard,” Mallers announced and further stated:

Ultimately, these payment giants want to see Lightning in action. They want to feel it, touch it, and see people use it. An open, instant, cheap, inclusive, and innovative payment network seems too good to be true. Time to show Lightning is the world’s superior payments rail.

Yo.

Lightning is live with Clover.

Strike is officially an integrated partner of the payments giant @Fiserv and we’ve launched our public pilot with @CloverCommerce point-of-sale terminals!

Clover merchants can now accept cheaper, faster, cash-final USD over Lightning.

🚀⚡️🍀 pic.twitter.com/o1GQg1xw5o

— Jack Mallers (@jackmallers) January 26, 2023

Why This Is Massive News For Bitcoin Adoption?

The Lightning Network is central to Bitcoin’s adoption as a payment method, and Strike’s initiatives play an important role.

While Cash App has already integrated the Lightning Network, Mallers announced a slew of powerful partnerships at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, including integrations with e-commerce giant Shopify and with NCR, the world’s largest POS systems provider, as well as payments company Blackhawk.

But today’s announcement by Mallers about the partnership with Fiserv and Clover isn’t a bit less significant. Parent company Fiserv is listed on the S&P 500 stock index and the NASDAQ-100 stock index.

Clover is a cloud-based point of sale (POS) platform for Android that launched in April 2012 and has a staggering annualized gross payment volume of $233 billion. As Mallers touted, Bitcoin Lightning could compete side-by-side with Visa and Mastercard for this transaction volume.

At press time, BTC was at $22,965, registering a minor 0.1% drop in price over the last 24 hours.