Leading cryptocurrency exchange, Bitfinex announced integrating Lightning Network’s Wumbo Channels to expedite payment transaction time, on its platform, enabling the exchange to provide users with instant Bitcoin deposit and withdrawal capabilities.
The Wumbo channels aim to offer the Bitfinex users the ability to deposit and withdraw large amounts of Bitcoin more efficiently and in a cost-effective way. This would eventually prompt retailers and service providers to build new, innovative applications and sell high-value goods and services over the Lightning Network with the help of Wumbo Channels as they help to reduce the requirements to open and close multiple channels, the blog post revealed.
Earlier, the protocol developers had set a hard cap on the maximum capacity of the Lightning Network payment channels in order to protect users from unexpected bugs or errors in the still-nascent network was still young, since its implementations were in a development phase.
But as the second-layer scalability solution became more mature, the major implementations of the Lightning Network protocol have measures to remove the hard cap on channel capacity, which had earlier thwarted the capability for unlimited channel sizes and payment amounts.
The official announcement further read,
“With this support, the general public will have the ability to open channels up to 2 Bitcoin capacity with either of our nodes. A number of initial retailers and wallet providers like Bitrefill, LnMarkets and Lightning Labs, with the ability to open channels with up to 5 Bitcoin capacity.”
While asserting that this development was in fact a “big step towards the goal of scaling Bitcoin” through the adoption of the Lightning Network, Bitfinex also revealed 3×5 Bitcoin channels, which are the biggest channels in the network so far.
Interestingly, Bitfinex was one of the first major crypto exchanges to have integrated the second-layer protocol on its platform in December 2019 shortly after integrating bech32 [SegWit] addresses the previous month as a primary step toward the full Lightning integration.
The Layer 2 protocol has seen a steady rise in terms of the total value locked [USD] in its. At the time of writing, this figure stood at $11.74 million.