What are we building at Lightning Pay?

Connecting New Zealand to the Lightning Network

Written by Brandon - Lightning Pay Team

Updated Dec 17, 2024



We’ve told you our story about why we decided to build Lightning Pay. In this article, we’ll focus on what we’re aiming to achieve. Ultimately, our mission is to connect New Zealand to the Bitcoin Lightning Network. 

If you've read some of our other content, you know that we believe that bitcoin is better money. But why? Simply, it is a better medium to use for every application of money. So, what do we do with money?

  • Spend: We use money to purchase goods or services that we demand today.
  • Save: We defer our spending for a later time. In this role, money should serve as a durable and low risk custodian of the value we currently have, allowing us to safely use it to consume or spend in the future.
  • Invest: We can choose to use our money in service to an opportunity we believe will return more to us later. However, this generally also comes with a risk of loss.
  • Share: Sharing the value we've acquired with our neighbours, friends, or a cause we want to support.

The Savings Problem

Nobody can save their money, not really, anyway. Kiwis, just like people in other parts of the world, tend to get on the 9 to 5, working 40 years of their lives, receiving the New Zealand Dollar in return for their time. If you find yourself in the privileged position where you can consistently keep your expenses below your income, you have a decision to make.

  • How do you save that value you worked for?
    • For most, saving isn't possible.
    • What we do instead is we are forced to put that value at risk, or let it melt away via inflation.
    • To "save" that value from inflation, your only option is to invest your money into higher risk assets like equities.
    • This either requires entrusting an expert in equities and investment, or taking on a second "job" to become one yourself. 
  • Saving is different than investing.
    • Saving is deferred spending, and little else.
    • It means taking the time and energy you've spent making the money you have and carrying it forward into the future.

This is something we think should be possible.

The Solution for Savings

Bitcoin.

You may have heard, bitcoin is volatile. It is, for sure. But, given a long enough time horizon, bitcoin has always been a the best performing asset over time, with a very high rate of return over any four year period in its existence. The reason it can do this is that demand for its properties continues to grow, and its fixed supply ensures that this demand can only be met by others that wish to exchange that value for dollars, goods or services. 

We also think saving in bitcoin should be easier.

  • Converting your dollars to bitcoin should be as easy as making a transfer between your checking and savings account
  • It should be efficient, minimising loss due to fees and risk of loss due to insecurity or accidental loss

We want to make it easy for the average kiwi to use bitcoin for savings.

The Payments Problem

Every day, we all encounter surcharges for every day payments at the diary. Maybe you’re like me, and you go through the trouble of putting your card in the chip reader, entering your pin, then on an unlucky day doing a dance where you swipe, do the chip thing again, and go back and forth appease the eftpos gods. Maybe you just grit your teeth and pay the fee. 

New Zealand has a payments problem. For merchants in New Zealand, payments services are among the largest costs a small business will incur in daily trading.

  • New Zealand payment fees for credit and contactless payments are among the highest in the developed world. On average, New Zealand businesses will spend $15k more on payment service costs than their Australian counterparts, annually.
  • To combat fraud and chargebacks, settlement time for most payments systems can range from 2-10 business days
  • A host of intermediaries with exclusive permission to stay in the middle of payments drive up the overall cost for merchants.

The Payments Solution

We can do better. Enter and the Lightning Network. 

The payments network built on top of Bitcoin offers a number of crucial improvements to our payments experience in New Zealand.

  • Payments are instant
  • Settlement is final, there are no chargeback risks associated with Lightning Network Payments
  • Extremely cheap, payment fees on the Lightning network are fractions of a cent
  • Native Payer Privacy
  • Programmable Money, you’ll be amazed at the things we can do
  • No Intermediaries, Lightning Network Payments are Peer to Peer

Lightning Pay

First, we knew that in order to create an amazing payments experience, we had to find a way for our customers to get from New Zealand Dollars to bitcoin on the Lightning Network quickly. A circular economy with bitcoin alone can’t work today, merchants have suppliers and employees that need to be paid in dollars. 

Unfortunately, this didn’t exist. So our first product was to build exactly that, an efficient and cost effective method to convert New Zealand Dollars to bitcoin on the Lightning Network. 

Next, we built the basics for merchants:

  • Point of Sale App
  • Hosted Online Payments

With these simple things in place, we can offer the means by which merchants and payers alike can experience a new payments experience.

  • Merchants can accept payments via bitcoin and receive NZD by the next business day
    • Removing all fees from the equation, you get every cent you’ve asked for from your payer, and they pay only a fraction of a cent for the network fee
    • You get NZD settled to your bank the next business day, improving your cashflow
    • Reduce risk by avoiding chargebacks and other issues with legacy payments systems
    • Avoid the tax and accounting hurdles for merchants by allowing them to receive NZD
    • Attract bitcoin enthusiasts to your place of business
  • Individuals who might spend with our merchants can interact with the Lightning network seamlessly
    • Buy bitcoin for savings, or just to top up your Lightning Wallet for spending, with a couple of clicks
    • Pay with convenience and privacy anywhere in the country (or abroad) that accepts bitcoin on Lightning 
    • Individuals who have already saved in bitcoin, can use that value in the future to pay their bills using our bill pay service

What’s next for Lightning Pay?

Ultimately, we want to blur the lines between the New Zealand Dollar and bitcoin, and we want to offer a full suite of financial services, but in a way you're not used to seeing. Because, unlike your bank, we don't have any of your money. 

  • We want to enable a modern payments experience for consumers, complete with a feature rich payments app
  • We want to enable individuals across NZ to save for their future in bitcoin more easily
  • We want to give individuals the ability to spend bitcoin, dollars however they choose, and get bitcoin rewards in the process
  • We want to remove the friction from the NZ payments experience for merchants entirely 
  • We want to make the job of accounting for bitcoin sales or NZD sales through our apps as seamless as using dollars today.
  • We want to give Bitcoin savers the ability to live in the modern world with the money they choose, which involves creating even more financial services on top of this platform (lending, retirement savings, and more).

We hope you're as excited as we are about moving forward to this future. We're looking forward to sharing with you what's next!


As ever, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at Lightning Pay.