Canadian exchange Bull Bitcoin is integrating the Lightning Network to its non-custodial services.
CEO Francis Pouliot says users of the platform can now buy Bitcoin and receive the payment in their own wallet through the Lightning Network.
Users of Canada’s first and largest Bitcoin payments processor, established in 2015, can also sell their Bitcoin and receive payouts in their bank accounts, or pay any third party bills in Canada through the platform.
Notably, Bull Bitcoin has used LNURL-Cypherapp, an open source software, to integrate lightning, allowing users to verify and modify the open-source software before using it without having to trust it.
A statement from the company read: “Bull Bitcoin’s primary objective is to develop sustainable solutions to Bitcoin self-custody and scalability problems without compromising on our cypherpunk principles.”
One unique feature of the Cyphermode plugin are its fallback addresses. If a user of Bull Bitcoin generates an LNURL withdrawal code that goes unused for a window of 7 days, the LNURL withdrawal voucher will be deleted and the payment is rerouted on-chain to the user’s fallback address.
This system was specifically designed to avoid Bull Bitcoin becoming a de-facto custodian of an unused withdrawal voucher for Bitcoin. Furthermore users can change their fallback addresses every time they make a Bitcoin purchase over the Lightning Network using LNURL to avoid unnecessary privacy leakage.
Traditionally, non-custodial exchanges are subject to many more Bitcoin Network fees as they must move Bitcoin for every buy and sell order. Bull Bitcoin initially solved for this by batching multiple transactions, but the company reported this only reduces fees up to around 75% at best, and it also caused payments to be delayed.
The implementation of the lightning network will go a long way to alleviate on-chain fees, by allowing Bull Bitcoin and other non-custodial, bitcoin-centric exchanges to move smaller amounts of Bitcoin off chain through the lightning network.
Bull Bitcoin’s strategy is solving for network fees rising as Bitcoin adoption grows, to guard itself against becoming a custodial payment platform.
The news comes just one week after the product lead at Twitter confirmed a leak that the company was beta testing Lightning enabled user profiles.