The team at Lightning Pay, Rob, Brandon and Simon are very excited to announce that we will finally be launching our closed beta of our first product at Lightning Pay on Monday, March 18th.
Our mission at Lightning Pay is to connect New Zealand to Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.
If you already know about Lightning Pay, you know that our major target is to relieve the pressure we all feel around the state of payments in New Zealand. We hope to deliver a new experience, eliminating the extreme fee burden, variable and long settlement times for payments that are born by merchants and consumers alike. We hope to deliver a seamless payments experience whether you want to receive bitcoin or NZD, and pay in bitcoin or NZD.
In order to do this, we went out looking for a cheap, simple, and fast way to convert NZD to BTC and back again. Turns out we had to build it ourselves! So, the first service out of the door for Lightning Pay is exactly that. The easiest, fastest, and least expensive way to top up your lightning wallet with bitcoin in New Zealand.
We’re really excited to share this with you. If you’re purchasing bitcoin, from the time you login at Lightning Pay, you should be able to get bitcoin delivered to your wallet in seconds. If you’re selling bitcoin, you’ll be able to get NZD to your bank account by the end of the day, or the next business day.
Those of you who are already registered for the closed beta will be invited on Monday to sign up for this service. We at Lightning Pay will use this group to test our systems, primarily focusing on improving our onboarding experience and our ability to smooth out the rough edges of this service for users. We’re extremely focused on the security, simplicity, and speed of this service, so we’ll keep improving as we invite more and more people to the beta.
As we do this, we are continuing to work on our first merchant payments app, which will deliver a straightforward way for merchants to accept bitcoin payments, and optionally receive the bitcoin in their own wallet or receive NZD the next business day. We have big plans on how we might deliver a unique payments experience in New Zealand, focused on removing fees, opening New Zealand to a global payments network, maintaining privacy, facilitating new and innovative payment systems, and maintaining a seamless connection between the world built on the back of better money and the legacy system we all depend on today.
I look forward to taking you all on this journey with us, and we hope you are as excited as we are about seeing innovation in payments in New Zealand.