Amidst Broad Regulatory Crackdown, Coinbase Moves Forward With Lightning Network

By Landon Manning

While Coinbase and other exchanges have been engaged in a legal battle with U.S. financial regulators, the firm has made a major advance for its users by adopting the Lightning Network and declaring a firm support for Bitcoin as the leading cryptocurrency. 

This announcement comes from a tweet made by Coinbase’s CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong, who took to the platform to announce Lightning Network integration, asking for patience as he explained that implementation would take time. Critically, Armstrong also added that “Bitcoin is the most important asset in crypto and we’re excited to do our part to enable faster/cheaper Bitcoin transactions,” signaling a clear maximalist attitude in the company. This announcement comes after earlier discussion in July, as Armstrong claimed that Coinbase was “looking into” the possibility of adding Lightning Network support.

A wildly popular protocol built on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain, the Lightning Network seeks to solve the scalability problem in Bitcoin by using a mesh network to carry out small-denomination trades and resolve them using fewer operations of the main network. In other words, Bitcoin’s trustless and decentralized system requires large amounts of energy and time to process transactions, but the Lightning Network can allow users to spend tiny amounts of bitcoin on a daily basis without any hassle. In terms of making Bitcoin practical for ordinary adoption, the Lightning Network is truly revolutionary. 

This development takes place within a particularly fraught moment inside Coinbase,…