100 merchants will test the Lightning Network through the CoinGate service

CoinGate is launching a pilot program allowing 100 different web resources to test Lightning Network (LN) technology in real time.

Lightning Network (LN) LN is a network of payment channels that allows users to conduct micropayments between two parties outside the blockchain. 

Lightning has grown significantly over the past seven months since its introduction to the Bitcoin main network. A good impetus for this was the launch of the Blockstream Lightning online store in January of this year. Since then, the network has processed payments worth 25 BTC using 2,560 nodes and 76,000 channels, and the commission has dropped to less than one satoshi.

Lithuanian cryptocurrency processing service CoinGate, which provides a payment gateway both online and with traditional POS options, is now testing the decentralized Lightning Network (LN). The company is confident that the launch of Lightning Network protocol technology will provide high speed Bitcoin transactions with reduced commission fees. And the errors identified during testing will help in the further development and improvement of the network.

An experimental program for testing LN in real time offers one hundred merchants to make payments through the Lightning Network from July 1. The official CoinGate blog reports that online stores, servers providing web hosting services, sports betting sites and entertainment web resources have been selected for testing the beta version.

Despite the fact that the first beta version of LN for the main Bitcoin network was successfully tested, Lightning wallet Eclair is already available on Google Play and even Pokétoshi, the Pokemon game works through the Lightning Network, the network is still under development and not ready for use, according to many experts. 

CoinGate Technical Director, Rytis Beliauskas, is confident that testing new protocol capabilities will greatly benefit not only the network, but also the entire community awaiting an upgrade to the Bitcoin network. This pilot project was primarily launched to test LN's ability to make Bitcoin a mainstream means of payment. At the moment, LN technology is still complex for the average user and is designed more for international payment services. Although such applications may take several years to develop.. However, Beliauskas believes in the prospects of the Lightning Network so much that he announced that the company is ready to fully compensate participants for lost funds if such a loss occurs during LN testing.