- During Bitcoin Conference 2022, Robinhood Chief Product Officer Aparna Chennapragada revealed that the company is making plans to add the Bitcoin Lightning Network to its platform.
- Robinhood aims to be the “most trustworthy and user-friendly” cryptocurrency platform.
During the Bitcoin Conference 2022 in Miami, Florida, Aparna Chennapragada, Director of Products for Robin Hood, revealed that the company has implemented the cryptocurrency wallets and is making plans to add the Bitcoin Lightning Network to its platform.
The crypto wallet will be available to 2 million eligible users who were within the Whitelist, allowing them to make transactions between digital assets. However, customers located in Nevada, New York, and Hawaii will be left off the list.
Robinhood Crypto Wallet
Six months ago Robin Hood informed its users that they would work on develop a wallet function that will allow customers to deposit and withdraw cryptocurrencies and to be able to access it, he set up a waiting list.
Previously, clients of the platform could only buy and sell cryptocurrencies and Robinhood acted as the custodian, however, they would not be able to transfer their cryptocurrencies in and out of the platform. Hence, The 2 million users will now be able to buy, sell and move their crypto as they wish from Robinhood.
“With Wallets, customers will have full access to their crypto and can use it to participate in the crypto ecosystem, tipping on social media, paying NFTs, and more. Unlike other crypto platforms, there is no fee to withdraw crypto from Robinhood”, explains the press release.
Also, Vlad Tenev, CEO and co-founder of Robinhood explained that the goal is to be the “most reliable and user-friendly” cryptocurrency platform. One aspect to keep in mind is that the wallet offered by Robinhood is guarded, that is, users will not have access to their private keys.
Robinhood’s first steps in the crypto market
Robinhood’s announcement about its plans to integrate the Bitcoin Lightning Network so that its customers can send and receive Bitcoin (BTC) in seconds is just the first step of the platform and they will look to this integration allows you to reduce costs for your customers to interact with the entire crypto ecosystem.
“We’re excited to bring even lower costs to our customers by integrating with the Lightning Network,” Tenev assured.
In addition, Robinhood ensures that The Lightning Network reduces the carbon footprint of each transaction, since Bitcoin miners are not needed to validate.
However, the reality is that Robinhood still does not offer its users a complete experience. In fact, the page frequent questions of Robinhood ensures that “any NFT sent to a Robinhood Ethereum address may be lost and unrecoverable” since they do not yet offer support for this asset class.
So Robinhood still seems to have a long way to go before it becomes the leading cryptocurrency platform it wants to be.
What is Lightning Network?
Lightning Network is a technology intended to make Bitcoin transactions even more efficient. In this sense, it uses micropayment channels to scale the capacity of the Bitcoin Blockchain and carry out faster and less expensive transactions.
Similar to Ethereum, the Bitcoin blockchain faces a scaling problem. It could be said that it is not so serious or obvious because thousands of protocols are not stored in Bitcoin, unlike Ethereum. However, the problem is there.
The Lightning Network set out to solve this problem by creating a second layer on the main Bitcoin Blockchain.
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