Bitcoin Magazine
Blockstream Executive Peter Bain: Institutional Clients Say Bitcoin “Poised for a Big Bull Run”
Bitcoin is holding $81K through an equity selloff, a rising 10-year and unrest in Europe, and Blockstream CMO Peter Bain calls that “a really, really strong signal.” He joins Grace Remington and Sean Hagan to explain why the technology build-out comes before the price, what Blockstream’s new Lugano hub and consulting division mean for institutional adoption, and why Switzerland’s clear rules and banking depth make it the right launch market. He also gives the first update on the Liquid Network incident: the swap service is back and users can move Bitcoin to the main chain.
Chapters:
0:00 Bitcoin Holding $81K Through the Equity Selloff Is a “Strong Signal”
0:44 Build-Out Before Price: Adoption, Stablecoins and Tokenized Equities
1:26 Blockstream’s Lugano Hub and New Consulting Division for Institutions
2:10 Why Treasury Companies Are Mostly American and Why Switzerland Is Next
3:19 Quantum Is Decades Away: Bitcoin’s Real Weak Spots
4:22 The PHP Exploit and Why Everyone Must Rethink How Software Ships
5:07 Making Bitcoin Quantum Resistant: Blockstream Research and Signature Schemes
6:18 How Consensus Reaches a Quantum Upgrade and the Bitcoin Security Consortium
7:33 Liquid Network Hack Update: Swap Service Restored, Network Back Online
8:27 Outlook Through 2027: “Poised for a Big Bull Run”
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
This post Blockstream Executive Peter Bain: Institutional Clients Say Bitcoin “Poised for a Big Bull Run” first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.
LND’s October 22 release candidate brings attention to a quiet source of wallet risk: outside fee estimates that software treats too generously. The 0.21.5 development notes describe a ceiling for values received through an external fee API, alongside fixes to other node operations.
TL;DRThe release notes say external estimates previously had a lower bound without the corresponding upper bound. The documented repair limits the estimate before it can flow into fee-sensitive wallet operations.
The associated change applies a ceiling of 10,000 satoshis per virtual byte and also bounds the API’s minimum-relay estimate. That ceiling is an extreme-value guardrail. It is not a statement that such a fee is normal, economical or required by current network conditions.
A fee estimate is an input to a decision, not an instruction that must be obeyed at any cost. A service can return an unusable value because of an error, a changed data format or a compromised dependency. Bounding the input limits one way that an upstream problem can influence a wallet.
The larger operational issue connects with Bitcoin Core’s revised disclosure process: software that handles money needs both a method for finding problems and a path for getting repairs into use.
The GitHub release page identifies the build as a pre-release and says it requires no database migration. It provides signature and binary-verification instructions. Those details support checking what was downloaded; they do not demonstrate how it will behave in every node configuration.
The notes also describe a native SQL connection-pool deadlock fix. That matters because node reliability depends on storage behavior as well as network communication. A process that remains running while requests stop completing can still fail the applications depending on it.
Testing a candidate therefore needs to cover the service’s actual work: receiving requests, accessing storage, handling failures and restarting cleanly. The absence of a database migration removes one category of change, but it does not prove that every interaction with existing data is unchanged.
For payment providers, that is distinct from the custody controls explored in shared-key Bitcoin lending. Keeping signing authority secure and keeping a payment node functioning are separate responsibilities.
The same distinction explains why custody and recovery arrangements cannot replace software maintenance. This candidate offers specific changes to evaluate. The final release decision and an operator’s deployment decision remain additional steps.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Bitcoin Magazine
Square Tech and GOAT Network Sign MOU to Advance AI Agent-Powered Stablecoin Payments in South Korea
SEOUL, October 22, 2026 – Square Tech (KOSDAQ: 148250) announced today that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with GOAT Network, the Bitcoin-secured infrastructure for agentic commerce, to explore AI agent-powered stablecoin payment services in South Korea as part of its Digital Solutions business. DAC Labs, the core infrastructure developer behind GOAT Network, has also joined the agreement to provide technical support.
As an initial priority, the companies will explore integrating GOAT Network’s AI agent payment technology into a stablecoin payment program for foreign tourists that Square Tech is currently developing with Lordsystem, a South Korean mobile identity verification company. The program aims to enable foreign visitors to verify their identities using mobile passports and make payments at participating merchants in South Korea using US dollar-denominated stablecoins. The partners will also evaluate potential expansion into additional services, including digital gift card and voucher purchases, subject to applicable legal and regulatory reviews.
Under the agreement, Square Tech will lead domestic business development, merchant partnerships, and regulatory engagement. GOAT Network will provide its AI agent payment technology and network infrastructure, while DAC Labs will support technical integration, security reviews, and network operations.
The collaboration comes as South Korea continues to develop its regulatory frameworks for artificial intelligence and digital assets. The country’s AI Basic Act, formally known as the Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence and Establishment of a Foundation for Trust, came into effect in January 2026. Meanwhile, discussions are underway in the National Assembly on the proposed Digital Asset Basic Act, which seeks to establish a regulatory framework for digital assets, including Korean won-denominated stablecoins.
At Korea Blockchain Week 2026 in Seoul, GOAT Network demonstrated these capabilities through an interactive agent-powered purchasing experience, highlighting early consumer interest in AI-driven commerce. The collaboration with Square Tech represents a further step toward bringing these capabilities into real-world payment applications.
The proposed solution will incorporate technical safeguards designed to ensure trust, security, and transparency when AI agents execute payments on behalf of users. Each AI agent will be assigned a verifiable on-chain identity based on the ERC-8004 standard. Spending limits, user authorization mechanisms, and comprehensive transaction records will also be implemented to enable transparent monitoring of AI agent payment activities.
In the initial phase, the companies plan to support US dollar-denominated stablecoins through arrangements that meet applicable licensing and regulatory requirements. They also intend to establish the technical foundation for potential support of Korean won-denominated stablecoins as South Korea’s digital asset regulatory framework evolves.
Kangho Kim, CEO of Square Tech, said: “South Korea is rapidly establishing the regulatory foundations for AI and digital assets. The next important step is translating these developments into practical services that consumers and merchants can use. Through this collaboration, Square Tech aims to integrate global technologies into South Korea’s domestic payment environment and regulatory framework, while building a new payment ecosystem that brings AI and stablecoins into everyday transactions.”
Kevin Liu, Co-Founder and CEO of GOAT Network, said: “The next evolution of AI agents goes beyond understanding user requests to making purchases on their behalf. For agentic commerce to scale, businesses need to make their products and services accessible to AI agents, while consumers need assurance that purchases are authorized, spending stays within defined limits, and payments are secure. Through our collaboration with Square Tech, we aim to explore how these capabilities can support real-world commerce in South Korea.”
The companies intend to comply with all applicable South Korean laws and regulations, including the Electronic Financial Transactions Act, the Virtual Asset User Protection Act, the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act, and the Act on Reporting and Use of Certain Financial Transaction Information. Where necessary, they will work with appropriately licensed service providers to deliver the proposed services. Consumer-facing features will be introduced in phases, subject to legal and regulatory review.
Square Tech was founded in 2002 and is based in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. The company develops and produces LTCC (Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic) components and substrates used in the telecommunications, defense, and automotive industries, and has been listed on KOSDAQ since 2016. Through its Digital Solutions business, Square Tech is expanding into digital asset payments. The company is developing a stablecoin payment program for foreign tourists with Lordsystem, a South Korean mobile identity verification company, and is pursuing cooperation with Anchorage Digital, a US-based institutional digital asset platform, on institutional digital asset infrastructure.
GOAT Network is Bitcoin-secured infrastructure for agentic commerce, connecting businesses, consumers, developers, and AI agents. Its core product, GOAT Flow, makes products and services discoverable, understandable, and purchasable by AI agents, while GOAT AgentKit provides developers with tools to build agent-native applications. GOAT Network’s core infrastructure is developed by DAC Labs, a research and engineering company specializing in blockchain infrastructure, zero-knowledge technology, and AI agent systems.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored press release. Readers are encouraged to perform their own due diligence before acting on any information presented in this article.
This post Square Tech and GOAT Network Sign MOU to Advance AI Agent-Powered Stablecoin Payments in South Korea first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Bitcoin Magazine.
Bitcoin Magazine
Liquid Network Announces Final Stages of Recovery Following Massive Hack
The Liquid Network on Tuesday said that things were up and running again, over one month after hackers stole 4,000 bitcoin, worth about $320 million at the time, from the network’s federation wallet before returning most of it in a “white hat” operation.
Writing in a blog post, the Liquid Network said that it was entering “the final stages of recovery with enhanced security.”
Hackers in September stole 4,000 bitcoins from the federation wallet that backs the Blockstream sidechain. Blockstream was able to negotiate to get back most of the funds.
LBTC:BTC swaps full service again. swap @liquid_btc to/from mainchain BTC on @side_swap. swap @liquid_btc to/from lightning on @AquaBitcoin. https://t.co/csslFIIRAE
— Adam Back (@adam3us) October 20, 2026
“The final phase of restoration involves reestablishing the network’s full 1:1 bitcoin backing, followed by the controlled reactivation of Federation peg-outs for authorized PAK key holders,” the Liquid blog post read.
“The Federation, Blockstream, and independent security experts have made substantial progress toward this objective, with the necessary technical infrastructure and safeguards now in place.”
The post added that it had introduced phased swaps again. Blockstream CEO Adam Back wrote on X on Tuesday that swaps were working again.
Liquid is a layer-2 created by Blockstream that allows users to quickly move assets backed 1:1 with bitcoin. People can swap stablecoins for bitcoin and bitcoin on the Lightning Network on apps that support the Liquid Network.
Hackers were able to get 4,000 bitcoins by exploiting an inflation bug on the Liquid sidechain to create over 4,000 LBTC — a token supposedly backed by bitcoin — that did not exist before and cash them out for real on-chain BTC.
The hackers claimed to be white hat hackers who then had an exchange with Blockstream via messages written into Bitcoin blocks. Though critics argue they were not so ‘white’ since they kept 15% of the stolen funds, worth millions.
In one message, the hackers slammed Blockstream as “delusional, greedy, and arrogant,” and threatened to reveal all of Blockstream’s encrypted messages in the exchange unless the company paid the hackers 10% of the bitcoins as an official bounty.
“You SHALL pay 10% using your own money as bug bounty or you will cause all your holders a 15% loss for your irresponsibility and stinginess,” the message read.
The hackers are still holding onto around 600 bitcoins — or 15% of the total funds — worth close to $50 million at today’s prices as per the latest public knowledge.
It is not clear if Blockstream reached a settlement with the hackers in private.
This post Liquid Network Announces Final Stages of Recovery Following Massive Hack first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
With the advent of blockchain technology, the way transactions and records in the digital world are handled has been revolutionized. Rather than being dependent solely on the central authority, blockchain technology allows multiple parties to manage and verify shared records using the decentralized nature of the blockchain network.
While a lot of applications have been built on existing blockchain platforms, some require an extra blockchain due to technical reasons or for other concerns. While there are advantages to creating an extra blockchain, certain aspects must be considered.
It is important to understand the pros and cons of using an independent blockchain to determine its viability.
Running one’s own blockchain network consists of setting up a blockchain protocol that has its own settings, validation system, and operational principles. Depending on the type of blockchain network, a token of its own, special validators, and governance system may be part of it as well.
In general, blockchain networks are based on various participation types. In public blockchain networks, anyone can participate, whereas in private networks, only approved entities participate in the network operations. In consortium blockchain networks, various organizations operate the network.
Different participation types bring various challenges in terms of transparency, management, decentralization, and security. The correct approach depends on the application area.
An independent blockchain gives the freedom to design its protocol rules based on some particular demands. They could include the validation of transactions, block creation, fees, and updates to the software.
For instance, an organization-specific blockchain would favor the accessibility and predictability of transactions. On the other hand, the demands of a public blockchain may include the open nature and anti-censorship features.
Flexibility is advantageous when the application’s demands are in disagreement with the pre-existing design of the blockchain. But increased control translates into increased responsibility too.
Consensus algorithms enable the participating nodes in the blockchain network to reach an agreement about the state of the blockchain. There exist different algorithms that provide different tradeoffs between security, efficiency, energy usage, and decentralization.
Proof of Stake utilizes incentives and validators. Proof of Authority makes use of validators, whereas Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithms assist in reaching agreements among a group of nodes under certain failure scenarios.
Each consensus algorithm impacts transaction confirmation and the network’s response to disruptions differently. There isn’t a consensus algorithm that would suit all situations and is the best in all of them.
Fees for transactions on public blockchains can be subject to change depending on the level of demand on the network. The benefit of an independent blockchain is that there will be more flexibility with respect to the setting of the fees and how the transactions can be processed.
Some examples of fee structures include fixed parameters, dynamic fees, or other ways of paying for transaction fees. In any case, low transaction fees do not mean the absence of costs incurred by the network itself.
Depending on its structure, the standalone blockchain could create rules concerning who is allowed to become node operators, process transactions, or gain access to specific records.
This can prove helpful where there are several organizations that want to maintain a common ledger, but within certain participation policies. Permissioned blockchain systems allow restricting transaction validation operations to particular participants.
However, there are also downsides to introducing participation control. The greater control over participation can lead to less openness and decentralization, so the blockchain design should suit user needs.
The blockchain being created is not guaranteed security because of the existing network since it depends on many other factors such as the design of the protocols, the number of validators, the implementation, and the resources that will be used to secure the system.
A smaller number of validators makes coordination easier but may be more prone to collusion or service disruption. Poor consensus and software bugs may cause problems with transactions and availability of the network.
In order to ensure security, there should be extensive testing, code review and vulnerabilities detection.
It is not sufficient to have software that generates blocks. Communication between nodes needs to take place, transactions need to be verified, and data in the network should be accessible.
Running one’s own blockchain network also entails planning for software updates, back-ups, monitoring, recovery, and compatibility between different versions of the protocol.
All of this should take place even after the launch of the blockchain network. Otherwise, the network might experience problems in the future.
The operation of a blockchain can be significantly user-dependent. A newly developed blockchain would not possess as many integrations, tools for developers, liquidity, and community engagement as a preexisting platform.
Participation can take time to build up. Lack of participation may limit the functionalities of the network and make it challenging to have a properly decentralized validation community.
The linking of different blockchains can pose technical problems. It can include bridging, messaging systems, and other types of interoperability solutions which each comes with its own set of security issues.
Governance is also an issue that needs to be thought about. The blockchain needs a way for participants to propose and pass new protocols. Different opinions on upgrades and network policies can slow down decision making, sometimes resulting in diverging chains.
Maintaining a private blockchain network provides increased autonomy in relation to the rules of the network, its consensus algorithm, transaction costs, and participants. Yet, it entails constant spending on security, infrastructure, maintenance, and ecosystem development.
The decision to maintain one’s own blockchain network should be based on the requirements and needs of the business. With careful consideration of both strengths and weaknesses, businesses will be able to assess whether it is necessary to develop their own blockchain network or opt for an existing platform.
Exploring the Benefits and Limitations of Running Your Own Blockchain Network was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
In BDK’s Electrum client, the loop that gathers fee data for a wallet has a comment on line 588 of the 0.23.2 source that says exactly what it should do:
let prev_tx = self.fetch_tx(outpoint.txid)?;
// Ensure server returns the expected txout.
let txout = prev_tx
.output
.get(vout as usize)
The only check under that comment is that output number vout exists. Nothing checks that prev_tx is the transaction the wallet asked for. fetch_tx sends a txid to the Electrum server, takes back whatever transaction the server returns and caches it under the txid it asked for. The output then goes into a map keyed by the outpoint the wallet asked about, and that map is where BDK gets input values when it works out the fee on a transaction whose inputs the wallet doesn’t own.
So for a parent the wallet doesn’t already hold, a server could answer with any transaction that has enough outputs, and its amount would become that input’s value in the wallet’s fee numbers. That’s as far as I can follow it in the code. fetch_tx also serves the wallet’s own history, and I haven’t traced what a swapped transaction does on that path, or run any of this against a server that lies.
The fix is six lines in fetch_tx: compute the txid of what came back and return an error if it isn’t the one requested. It was merged to master on 24 April as PR 2188.
Master isn’t what gets published, though. bdk_electrum 0.24.0 came out on 8 May without the check; I diffed the published sources, and its fetch_tx is the same as 0.23.2’s. The backport, PR 2228, was merged on 16 June into a branch called release/chain-0.23.x, and that name nearly caught me out. I read it as the 0.23 line getting the fix. It’s the release branch for bdk_chain 0.23, and bdk_electrum’s 0.24 releases come off it. The fix sat merged there for 118 days, until 0.24.1 was published on 12 October at 05:29 UTC, 171 days after it first landed.
Cargo treats 0.23 and 0.24 as incompatible, the way it treats any minor bump before 1.0. A crate that asks for bdk_electrum 0.23 gets 0.23.2 at most, and no 0.23 release has the check. Moving to 0.24 also moves electrum-client from 0.24 to 0.25, so it takes an edit to the manifest, and cargo update won’t do it.
crates.io lists 11 crates that depend on bdk_electrum. Two use it only in tests. Of the other nine, five ask for 0.23 and four for 0.24. LDK Node is one of the five. Its 0.7.1 release came out at 13:53 UTC on 12 October, eight hours and 24 minutes after 0.24.1, still on bdk_electrum 0.23, and it asks for previous outputs in both its sync and its full scan. It does fill the client’s cache from its own wallet first, so parents it already holds never go to the server. fedimint-ldk-node 0.7.0 asks for 0.23 too. LDK Node’s main branch has moved to 0.24.0, which resolves to 0.24.1 on a fresh lockfile, so its next release should carry the check.
Downloads tell it from the other side. On 13 October, the first full day 0.24.1 existed, crates.io counted 2,050 downloads of bdk_electrum, and 530 were 0.24.1. 799 were 0.23.2, the last of the line that has no fix. Downloads are CI runs and mirrors as much as people, so I wouldn’t read them as users, but they’re the only count there is.
The case where any of this matters is a node pointed at an Electrum server somebody else runs. I don’t know of a way to count LDK Node deployments set up like that. Until LDK Node ships a release on 0.24, the apps built on it can’t get the check without patching LDK Node itself.
BDK’s Electrum txid check took 171 days to ship, and 5 of the 9 crates using it can’t get it was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Bitcoin Magazine
Researchers Build First Working Post-Quantum Defense for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network
Whether or not quantum computers will break Bitcoin one day is a hot topic.
But what about second-layer solutions like Lightning?
Well, researchers from East Texas A&M University, North American University, Florida Gulf Coast University, and Florida Institute of Technology have been working on that.
JUST IN: East Texas A&M University students announce they've built the first post-quantum security solution for the Bitcoin Lightning Network
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) September 22, 2026
In an announcement Tuesday, the team of researchers said that they built what they describe as the first full post-quantum security design for the Lightning Network.
As first uncovered in a research paper in September, the team said they added post-quantum cryptography to Lightning’s communications, payment requests and related systems, implemented in Rust-Lightning.
It works like this: The solution layers new quantum-resistant cryptography on top of Lightning’s existing cryptography rather than replacing it. It uses ML-DSA digital signatures and ML-KEM key exchange, post-quantum algorithms standardized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, alongside the classical methods Lightning already relies on.
In this hybrid design, an attacker would have to break both the new and the old cryptography to compromise a connection or forge a payment request.
According to the team led by Dr. Ahmet Kurt, an assistant professor in East Texas A&M’s Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, it took about three to four months and roughly 11,000 lines of code — and it’s a complete working implementation, not just a small demo.
Lightning lets users make fast, cheap Bitcoin payments through a network of off-chain channels instead of recording each one on the blockchain.
Its cryptography could eventually be broken by powerful quantum computers, and that risk exists even if Bitcoin itself gets upgraded, because Lightning has its own communication and payment systems, the team said.
They added that their work demonstrates that Lightning’s off-chain systems can begin preparing for the quantum era independently while others focus on solutions for the mainnet.
Quantum researchers have warned that a time will come when Bitcoin’s software — which underpins the biggest and strongest computer network in the world — will need to be upgraded to deal with quantum computing.
While some crypto VC firms have urged action, top developers in the space have argued that many of today’s quantum computers have limited capabilities.
Still, they have noted that their development could arrive unexpectedly — just like advances with artificial intelligence — and have started developing some solutions, including top Bitcoin infrastructure firm, Blockstream.
This post Researchers Build First Working Post-Quantum Defense for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
Bitcoin Magazine
AI Coding Agents Drive Surge in Bitcoin Integration Requests: Breez
Bitcoin software company Breez said demand for its developer tools has surged since AI coding agents went mainstream, with partnership inquiries rising roughly 14-fold as developers, and increasingly the agents they deploy, look to add bitcoin payments to their apps.
In a company blog post, it tied the jump directly to Anthropic’s Claude Code, which launched as a research preview in February 2025 and became generally available three months later.
Before 2025, Breez said, most prospective partners fell into three camps: committed bitcoin enthusiasts, crypto developers, and fintech firms that treat bitcoin as an asset class.
Since Claude Code arrived, the company said, it has heard from many developers with little or no bitcoin experience. Requests have come from fitness apps, messaging apps that want users to send each other money, an eSIM service for travelers, and the team behind a mushroom-identification app.
Breez said many of these developers pick bitcoin for speed. Setting up traditional payment acceptance, including a bank account and cross-border transfers, can take weeks or months, while the company says its SDK can be running within minutes.
Breez said a growing share of inquiries now come from software, not people. The company said it regularly fields requests from coding agents writing on behalf of the companies that deploy them.
The company argues agents favor bitcoin because it is permissionless. An agent can build an app and set up payments for users worldwide without opening a bank account, passing onboarding checks or signing forms.
“Bitcoin is agnostic about whether the code of its current owner and user is composed of DNA base pairs or weights in a neural net,” Breez wrote.
That same absence of gatekeeping has long drawn scrutiny from financial regulators, who require traditional payment providers to verify customers.
Breez said its newest SDK implementation, built on the Bitcoin scaling protocol Spark, handled the added volume without problems.
The company framed the shift as an update to investor Marc Andreessen’s 2011 essay arguing that software is eating the world, saying AI is now eating software. It compared Bitcoin’s role to background infrastructure like electrical sockets and subsea cables.
This post AI Coding Agents Drive Surge in Bitcoin Integration Requests: Breez first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
Bitcoin Magazine
WhiteBIT Integrates Lightning Network for Fast and Cheap Bitcoin Transactions
The Lightning Network continues to find use cases.
Crypto exchange WhiteBIT announced on Thursday that the platform has integrated the network to help users quickly and efficiently move funds.
Powered by BTC infrastructure provider Voltage, the Swiss exchange said that bitcoin withdrawals and deposits can be made over the network. A number of major exchanges — including Coinbase and Kraken — have integrated the second-layer solution in recent years.
— WhiteBIT (@WhiteBit) October 8, 2026
Faster $BTC transactions via the Lightning Network — using a QR code or payment details.
Deposit fee: 0.25%
Withdrawal fee: 0.15%
Move $BTC at Lightning speed. Learn more: https://t.co/nt0svdMqg5 pic.twitter.com/WHfmRKT6QI
“WhiteBIT’s mission is to make blockchain technology accessible and widely adopted by delivering practical, user-friendly solutions for digital assets,” WhiteBIT Founder and CEO Volodymyr Nosov said in a statement.
“Adding Lightning support brings us closer to this goal as we are making Bitcoin faster and more useful for customers who want to top up accounts, send and receive funds, and use Bitcoin across more real-world flows.”
Zug-based WhiteBIT, the 17th biggest exchange by transaction volume, according to CoinGecko data, added that the launch supports a faster Bitcoin rail with use cases for “remittances, exchange funding, merchant-style QR payments, and interoperability with Lightning-enabled wallets and applications.”
Transaction volume on Lightning has surged this year. The reason, broadly, is that exchanges are using the network to move funds because it’s so cheap and fast.
Launched in 2018, Lightning was previously pushed for smaller transactions like tipping or buying a cup of coffee.
The network also offers more privacy than Bitcoin’s main chain: because Lightning payments are settled off-chain rather than recorded on the public blockchain, individual payments are harder to trace.
This post WhiteBIT Integrates Lightning Network for Fast and Cheap Bitcoin Transactions first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
Today’s $SLX TGE felt like the perfect summary of where web3 is right now. Massive hype, giant valuation numbers floating around CT, and…
If a crypto payment appears in your wallet within a few seconds, does that mean the payment is actually final?
Not necessarily.
This is one of the easiest things to misunderstand when using blockchain networks. A transaction can appear successful while the network is still working toward making that transaction irreversible.
That difference between speed and finality is becoming increasingly important as blockchains try to handle more payments, trading activity, and financial applications.
When you send a crypto transaction, it generally goes through several stages.
First, the transaction is accepted into a block.
At this point, the network has included your transaction, but that does not always mean the transaction can never be changed.
As additional blocks are added after the block containing your transaction, confidence that the transaction will remain part of the chain increases.
More confirmations generally mean greater confidence.
Finality is the point at which the network considers the transaction settled and extremely difficult, or under the protocol’s rules effectively impossible, to reverse.
That is the part businesses and financial applications really care about.
A payment showing up quickly is useful. Knowing that the payment is settled is even more important.
Imagine paying for something with cryptocurrency.
The merchant does not only want to see that the transaction was broadcast. They want confidence that the money cannot suddenly disappear because the transaction was reorganized or reversed.
The same idea matters to exchanges.
An exchange receiving a deposit needs to know when those funds are safe to credit to a customer’s account. Waiting longer can improve certainty, but it can also make the user experience slower.
DeFi has an even bigger reason to care.
Lending platforms, decentralized exchanges, derivatives protocols, and other applications may execute several transactions based on what happened previously. If the underlying transaction is not sufficiently settled, a temporary change can create unexpected losses or liquidations.
So the real question is not simply:
“How fast is this blockchain?”
It is:
“How quickly can this blockchain provide reliable settlement?”
Making a blockchain faster sounds simple.
It isn’t.
Higher speed can require larger blocks, faster communication between validators, more powerful hardware, or changes to how consensus works.
Those changes can introduce new trade-offs.
If running a validator becomes too expensive, fewer people may be able to participate. If fewer independent participants can operate the network, decentralization can become harder to maintain.
On the other hand, making a network extremely conservative can improve some security properties while creating slower settlement.
There is no single perfect balance.
Blockchain networks are constantly deciding how to balance speed, security and decentralization.
This becomes particularly interesting when looking at Ethereum and Solana.
Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade is focused heavily on increasing execution capacity and changing how blocks are built and processed. Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade takes a different direction, with a major focus on reducing the time needed to reach finality.
So the two networks are not simply trying to win a race for the highest transaction count.
They are addressing different parts of the blockchain infrastructure.
For readers interested in the technical details behind these two upgrades, the Coinpedia Report provides a deeper comparison of Glamsterdam and Alpenglow, including their consensus changes, capacity goals and activation plans.
For everyday users, these technical changes may eventually become almost invisible.
You may not care which consensus mechanism confirms your transaction. You simply want to know that:
That is where finality becomes important.
A blockchain can process transactions quickly, but if users still have to wait a long time before they can confidently treat those transactions as settled, some of the benefit of that speed disappears.
The next phase of blockchain development may therefore be less about simply asking which network is faster.
The more useful question may be:
Which network can provide fast, secure and predictable settlement without sacrificing too much decentralization?
Ethereum and Solana are approaching that problem differently.
One is pushing execution and block capacity. The other is redesigning parts of its consensus system to make finality dramatically faster.
Both approaches highlight the same lesson: speed is only one part of blockchain performance.
For users, developers and financial applications, what ultimately matters is not just how quickly a transaction appears on the screen.
It is how quickly they can trust that it is truly settled.
Fast is useful. Final is what builds confidence.
Why Blockchain Finality Matters More Than Transaction Speed was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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