How is a credit issued in Lightning?
Bitcoin payments via the Lightning network enable fast, cost-effective and secure payment processing and are therefore ideal for crediting customer sales directly to the merchant.
As a Lightning payment provider, Coinsnap focuses on payment processing via Lightning and accordingly offers the forwarding of customer sales in the form of Lightning as a standardized version.
The customer’s Bitcoin or Lightning payment is forwarded as Lightning to the merchant’s Lightning Wallet.
The standard method is Lightning forwarding to a Lightning wallet with a Lightning address.
The merchant is free to choose which Lightning wallet to forward to from the solutions available on the market.
We provide an overview of Lightning wallets with a Lightning address in a separate article.
The sats credited to the Lightning Wallet are immediately available to the trader.
Bitcoin via the Lightning network is ideal for payment processing and it makes sense for merchants to use the Lightning balance to pay suppliers and employees via Lightning.
Most Lightning wallets with a Lightning address are externally managed (custodial) Lightning wallets.
This means that the wallet balance is held by the provider of the Lightning Wallet and not by you.
Accordingly, you should only leave a small amount of your Bitcoin balance on the Lightning Wallet for a short time.
When choosing a Lightning Wallet, you can opt for a self-managed (self-custody) Lightning Wallet with a Lightning address.
So far, the only provider of a self-managed Lightning Wallet with a Lightning address is Zeus, but it is to be expected that other self-managed Lightning Wallet providers will offer a Lightning address.
If you want to store your Lightning balance for the long term, we recommend storing it on your own Bitcoin hardware wallet.
The provider Bitbox has already announced a Lightning integration.
When using a pure Bitcoin hardware wallet without Lightning integration, a switch from Lightning to Bitcoin must be made.
The swap from Lightning to Bitcoin can be carried out with the provider Boltz.Exchange.
We have described exactly how this exchange works in the article Payout in Bitcoin.
