Coinbase CEO Confirms Bitcoin Lightning Network Integration Following Tweet Exchange With Jack Dorsey

Brian Armstrong, the CEO of one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms by trading volume, confirmed Wednesday that Coinbase will integrate the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

The news comes a month after the crypto executive interacted with X (formerly Twitter) co-founder Jack Dorsey.

While the Bitcoin Lightning Network, the layer-2 payment protocol layered on top of Bitcoin, solved slow transaction processing issues and was proposed to fix the scalability problem of the world's first-ever crypto asset, major crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Binance have not yet embraced the network, as community members speculate that integrating it would decrease CEXs incentives for income.

But, Coinbase on Wednesday finally announced it was integrating the Bitcoin Lightning Network to allow fast and cheaper Bitcoin transactions on its platform.

"The team did a great job digging into this, and we've made the decision to integrate Lightning. Bitcoin is the most important asset in crypto and we're excited to do our part to enable faster/cheaper Bitcoin transactions. Will take some time to integrate so please be patient," Armstrong said in a tweet.

The CEO's tweet came after Coinbase Cloud protocol specialist Victor Bunin announced on the social media platform X that he was leading the Bitcoin Lightning Network initiative, and encouraged the community to offer their insights.

"Friends, I'm happy to say that I'm leading up this effort. DM me if you'd like to grab some time to chat Lightning support at @Coinbase. Particularly keen to get insights on lift to add support, UX flows, open source tooling, service providers, and edge cases. Thanks," the protocol specialist said.

Armstrong's confirmation of the highly-anticipated integration came over a month after his public conversation with Dorsey, which took place on X in early August.

At the time, the Coinbase CEO said, "The next step for crypto is to make payments instant and free globally."

This step, according to Armstrong, is aimed at "getting the average payment under 1 cent and confirmed in under 1 second" and, if achieved, would "see orders of magnitude more payments move to crypto."

The Coinbase CEO also thinks that crypto can "improve global payments infrastructure, but it hasn't yet delivered on that promise as we're largely still stuck on layer 1. Payments are like water, they flow to the path of least resistance."

Dorsey responded to Armstrong's ambitious vision and fired a few questions, including, "Why do you continue to ignore bitcoin and lightning?" and "What 'crypto' is a better money transmission protocol and why?"

However, Armstrong denied the accusation, and confirmed that Coinbase was considering integrating support for Bitcoin Lightning, before assuring the Twitter co-founder that he would back Bitcoin Payments.

"Not sure why you think we're ignoring Bitcoin - we've onboarded more people to Bitcoin than probably any company in the world."

The Coinbase CEO added, "We're looking into how to best add Lightning. It's non-trivial, but I think worth doing. I'm all for payments taking off in Bitcoin," before saying, "Let's build it together."

Dorsey responded to Armstrong with an offer of partnership to Coinbase in this particular undertaking and thanked the platform for its role in introducing Bitcoin to people.

"No doubt Coinbase introduced more people to Bitcoin than anyone else. And I'm grateful for that," Dorsey said, adding, "Putting more of your resources towards your original focus on Bitcoin and layer 2 technologies would be amazing and we'd be happy to partner," Dorsey said, before adding, "We want an open protocol for money transmission for the internet that's not controlled by a single individual, company, or government. Same team."

Unfortunately, Armstrong did not reveal if Dorsey has a hand in this integration.

The Coinbase CEO also asked the community to be patient since the integration will take some time, thus failing to provide any timeline.

As of 10:25 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Bitcoin was trading up at $26,171.88 with a 24-hour trading volume down by 26.31% at $14.71 billion, representing a 0.50% spike in the last 24 hours and a 1.5% gain over the past seven days.

Based on the latest data from CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin's total circulating supply stands at 19.48 million BTC, with its value up by 0.46% at a $510.19 billion market cap.