Vietnam's oldest bitcoin exchange adds support for the Lightning Network

Vietnamese Bitcoin Exchange VBTC has integrated the Lightning Network. In an announcement on Sunday, Vietnam's oldest (and reportedly Bitcoin-only exchange) exchange revealed that Lightning Network withdrawals are now available to its customers.

The choice dictated by the needs of the Vietnamese

VBTC CEO Dominik Weil said deposits will be available later this year. According to an article by BitcoinVN News, the media section of BitcoinVN, the parent company which also owns VBTC, withdrawals from the Lightning Network are priced at 1.000 satoshi plus 0,2% of the withdrawn amount.

Normal bitcoin withdrawals have a fee of 100.000 satoshi. Weil said the decision was inspired in part by the high fees a bull market brings to bitcoin, as well as pressure from the local Bitcoin community, which has already embraced Lightning to a great extent.

“The Vietnamese Bitcoin community has developed a growing interest in playing and using the Lightning Network. There are now about a dozen businesses in Saigon / Vietnam set up to accept Lightning payments via Neutronpay; Asia's first Lightning ATM was launched last fall in Saigon by one of our community members in Saigon. Requests for an exchange that supported Lightning directly increased over time. So we decided to meet the users ”.

The news comes just days after the exchange also adopted SegWit's native batch transactions, which will allow it to group customer withdrawals together into SegWit transactions to reduce on-chain fees.

Bitcoin's Lightning Network meets exchanges

The choice of VBTC makes it one of the first exchanges to proceed in parallel with the continuous development of the Lightning Network technology. It also adds to a growing list of exchanges that have promised (or launched) support for Lightning this year, as the technology continues to spread to exchanges around the world.

The Bitfinex and River Financial exchanges entered 2021 with the full support of the Lightning Network and Bitcoin Pro announced in late 2020 that it would also launch support in 2021.

CoinCorner, which operates in the UK, launched Lightning in January and OKCoin announced last week that it is working on an integration that is expected to be open to customers in February.

Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark, whose company designs the implementation of Lightning Network software, told BitcoinVN News that integrating VBTC adds more charge to an already electric network effect.

“We believe bitcoin has so much potential for billions of people around the world, and VBTC's Lightning integration is a big step towards taking it to Asia and beyond,” he said. “As more exchanges join the Lightning Network, more people will be able to transact instantly, worldwide, for low fees. Network effects in action, ”he concluded.