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Lemon Cash brings Lightning to more than a million users in Latin America

 


The most popular crypto wallet in Latin America now allows Bitcoins to be received and sent via Lightning. That's great -- but it misses an important tenet of Bitcoin.


The South American payment service provider and money changer Lemon Cash integrates the Lightning network into its app. Users of the rapidly growing app can now also receive and send Bitcoins via Lightning.


This saves the fees, and the transactions happen in real time. Above all, a pillar of the Latin American crypto economy is getting ready for Lightning, which can be crucial for interoperability with El Salvador ’s Chivo app, for example .


The infrastructure of OpenNode, a payment service provider focused on Bitcoin and Lightning, works in the background. With OpenNode and Lemon Cash, two young, modern and hungry crypto startups meet.


Lemon Cash was just founded in 2019 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In its app, the service provider combines local currencies with cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. Lemon Cash users can deposit both crypto and fiat currencies, store them in the app and exchange them for numerous other coins. With Bitcoins, Ether, some stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies you can also earn up to 13 percent interest per year.


This business model is not uncommon, but it is not entirely risk-free either, as the tragedies of Celsius and BlockFi show. Things seem to be going great for Lemon Cash though. The startup has apparently achieved a kind of regional dominance.


According to Lemon Cash, it is "one of the fastest growing crypto startups in the world." The startup has now reached more than a million users and expanded to Brazil in the fall. Further expansions in Latin America are planned. With an investment of more than 17 million dollars, primarily from US venture capitalists, Lemon Cash is well positioned to maintain and expand this strong position.


One of Lemon Cash's recent achievements is its inclusion in an affiliate program with the credit card provider VISA . Through this, Lemon Cash can issue a VISA card that can be used to pay with Peso, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether Dollars. For each purchase, users also receive a 2 percent cashback in Bitcoin.


Open Node, on the other hand, impresses with a Bitcoin-only focus. This allows the payment service provider not to get bogged down in taking on new cryptocurrencies and operating a node for them. Instead, it can focus on always improving the Bitcoin payment experience.


In addition to a Lightning API, this also includes very short payout intervals, the option of splitting the payment and the option to convert the bitcoins received in whole or in part into fiat currencies.


Both Lemon Cash and OpenNode are trustees. Lemon Cash manages the keys and thus the user's coins, so it's more of a banking app than a crypto wallet; OpenNode does not sell any software for Lightning, but an API key through which customers like Lemon Cash can participate in the liquidity of OpenNode's Lightning channels.


So if Lemon Cash users make Lightning payments with the app in the future, that's to be cheered for as it will undoubtedly help the spread of Bitcoin and Lightning. It could also serve as proof that it is possible to scale Bitcoin to mass payments with Lightning. However, one should not be under the illusion that this has anything to do with Bitcoin's noble principle of managing its own keys. Because there is not just one intermediary between the sender and receiver, but at least two middlemen.


The fact that payments are still faster and cheaper than bank transfers should be telling.

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