Last week, blockchain technology company Bitfury Group (“Bitfury”) launched the Peach product suite, a set of tools designed to make Bitcoin’s Lightning Network easier to use for both vendors, consumers, and developers. This article focuses on the Peach products aimed at the first two of these three groups of potential users.
The Peach product suite includes
- Peach Wallet: “An open-source, cross-platform and user-friendly bitcoin wallet built for the Lightning Network”
- Peach Public Node: “Connect your node or personal wallet to our public Lightning Network node for easier and quicker payment channel creation”
- Peach Commerce: “An easy to use web-based API and e-commerce platform plugin for merchants to use bitcoin as an instant and low-cost payment method”
- Peach Terminal: “A cashless payments hardware device for vending machines and point of sale terminals that enables Lightning Network payments.”
Bitfury’s Medium blog post says that these products were “created and are supported by Bitfury’s Lightning Network engineering and research team, Lightning Peach.”
Valery Vavilov, the founder and CEO of Bitfury, had this to say:
“The Lightning Network will enable people to use bitcoin in their everyday lives. By providing these products to the market, Bitfury is encouraging worldwide adoption of this technology and providing unparalleled support to consumers and merchants.”
Pavel Prikhodko, Head of Lightning Peach, told Bitcoin Magazine:
“Merchants want a new payment method if it provides fast and easy transactions that drive new customers. Lightning makes it easier for merchants to accept bitcoin by enabling instant payments and minimal transaction fees. The scalability that the Lightning Network enables is essential if we want more merchants to begin accepting bitcoin payments. The currently missing piece in the ecosystem is a merchant solution that hides all the operational complexity of the network behind a clean, user-friendly, and reliable merchant product that enables a new payment method and drives new business at no extra financial or behavioral cost.”
Peach Wallet
Peach Wallet is available in both desktop (Linux, MacOS, and Windows) and mobile form (iOS and Android). It is “a free, cross-platform mobile wallet that enables users to explore and experiment with the Lightning Network,” and is “compatible with all existing implementations of the Lightning Network.”
Key features:
- “Send and receive payments within the Lightning Network using payment requests.”
- “Send and receive on-chain payments with regular transactions in the Bitcoin Blockchain.”
- “Create invoices.”
- “Create a custom channel via a Lightning address ID and the host IP of a peer.”
- “Send and receive payments within the Lightning Network via the Lightning ID address book.”
- “Recurring payments for subscription services between Lightning Peach users, which is useful when paying per-second or per-minute charges, such as video or voice calls.”
Peach Public Node
Bitfury’s Lightning Peach team says that it is “committed to running a reliable, stable, and well-connected Lightning node to help facilitate easier channel creation between Lightning Network users.” The Peach Public Node can be used for both outbound and inbound channels.
Peach Commerce
Peach Commerce is “a suite for both individual merchants as well as the payment processing companies to easily start accepting Lightning Network payments.”
Merchants do not need to run their own Lightning node to “accept instant and low-cost bitcoin payments.” Using Bitfury’s web-based Peach Merchant API, they can “start receiving Lightning Network payments with just a few lines of code.” The Peach Merchant Plugin is currently available for the PrestaShop e-commerce platform, and Bitfury is promising that support for Magento and WooCommerce is coming soon.
Peach Terminal
The Peach Terminal offers these benefits to businesses:
- “Increased sales by offering flexible payment options”
- “Security and innovation”
- “Fast transactions”
- “Small transaction costs”
Featured Image Courtesy of Bitfury Group
