TL;DR Breakdown:
- Popular Mexican retailing and banking company, Grupo Elektra, will support the Bitcoin Lightning network.
- The network allows for a faster and cheaper transaction with Bitcoin, and it’s ideal for micropayments.
A major financial and retail company in Mexico, Grupo Elektra, will soon begin to accept payments in Bitcoin, according to the billionaire owner, Ricardo Salinas Pliego. The adoption of the leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) for payment has risen significantly over the years, especially through the Bitcoin Lightning concept.
Soon the retail company will become one of the major Latin American corporations to support the Bitcoin second layer payment protocol.
Grupo Elektra to support BTC payments
The Mexican billionaire recently tweeted that the Bitcoin Lightning network will be implemented on Grupo Elektra stores. The Bitcoin payment network will enable the customers to easily pay for items on the store with BTC without having to worry about slow transactions or expensive transaction fees usually experienced in the main Bitcoin network.
Prior to the Grupo Elektra announcement, the billionaire had disclosed that his bank, Banco Azteca, will become the first to support Bitcoin in Mexican. This is not completely surprising, given that Ricardo Salinas Pliego has been a core believer in the cryptocurrency. He once disclosed his intention of allocating ten percent of his portfolio in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Lightning adoption soars
The Lightning Network is basically a layer two solution developed on the Bitcoin network to enable fast and cheap transactions with Bitcoin by “using bi-directional payment channels that are not settled on-chain in real-time.” The network has gained massive traction over the past months as a solution to the scalability issues with BTC.
It is ideal for micropayments in BTC, and so, it lowers the barrier to mainstream adoption of Bitcoin for payment. OKEx is one of the few cryptocurrency trading platforms that support the layer-two network. The Malta-based exchange said in April that the network could reduce the average fee of Bitcoin transactions to “less than 0.01 cents,” at an average time of “1-3 seconds.”
