Crypto Payments Via Email Now HERE!

October 24, 2023 2:25 pm Comments

We are 21st-century people with outdated 20th-century standards of moving and transferring money.

Much of the goals of the nascent blockchain industry revolve around this one problem: attempting to bring our wildly outdated system of transacting into the 21st century.

Lightspark is one such firm that is attempting a massive overhaul of the 1980s, fax-machine era of moving money around.

The company recently added support for the Universal Money Address (UMA), a standard that uses human-readable addresses, to send money directly through email.

UMA utilizes the Bitcoin Lightning Network and the LNURL protocol, which exists on top of HTTP, to accomplish this innovative feat. Lightspark announced on Monday:

“Today, we’re unveiling Lightspark’s enterprise-grade end-to-end solution for Universal Money Addresses (UMA).

UMA combines human-readable Lightning Addresses with enhanced messaging and integration with the Lightning Network’s real-time, global payment rails to make sending money as easy as sending an email. It is open-source and available for anyone to use.”

Lightspark Co-Founder Christian Catalini had this to say: “Universal Money Addresses (UMAs) — an open source standard for money movement to look and feel like sending an email. Today it’s yours to develop on. Excited about what developers, wallets, and platforms will build & invent with it.”

Trustnodes provided a list of services and protocols that are signed on to use the new standard:

Bitnob, Coins.ph, Foxbit, Ripio, and Xapo Bank will offer UMAs to their customers and already have waitlists, UMA announced.

Bakkt, a bitcoin custodian and trading company, also announced they are integrating UMA, starting with an alpha launch of UMA-capable Lightning service.

Catalini explained: “Universal Money Addresses (UMAs) let anyone send and receive money (fiat or crypto/bitcoin), 24/7 using their favorite UMA-enabled wallet, exchange, or bank. UMA is global and open source.

UMA uses the Bitcoin Lightning Network for fast, low-cost, and efficient payments. UMAs are interoperable, all that’s needed is for both participants to have an enabled account. This unlocks completely new payment experiences!”

Crypto News offered this perspective:

While Lightspark is proactive in offering enterprise-grade SDKs in multiple programming languages to drive adoption, the success of UMA heavily relies on widespread acceptance and integration by various industry players.

Early adoption by companies like Bitnob is a positive sign, yet the promise of involvement from other industry giants remains speculative.

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