More than one million Argentines will soon have access to Bitcoin’s Lightning Network on the Lemon Cash digital wallet through a partnership with bitcoin payments infrastructure company OpenNode, per a joint press release.
Lemon Cash is a fintech company based in Argentina and is mostly known for being a cryptocurrency exchange and also for operating the aforementioned digital wallet. The company serves well over one million customers in the Latin American (LATAM) region. This integration will allow all of these customers to facilitate transfers of value on Bitcoin with low-fees and fast settlement times through Lightning.
“Introducing the Lightning Network to more than one million users in partnership with OpenNode will be a huge step towards our main goal: to make crypto more usable and accessible in LATAM,” Lemon Cash co-founder Borja Martel Seward said.
LATAM has a higher level of concentrated adoption of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies than most regions, but Argentina itself ranks 10th globally in a report from on-chain analytics firm Chainalysis. Countries with heightened levels of inflation are more prone to rely on bitcoin as a store of value, which is also the case for Argentina as Reuters reported a rolling 12-month period of over 60% inflation.
“This partnership is yet another example of our capability and belief in Bitcoin as the new base layer for global payments,” says Josh Held, head of strategy at OpenNode. “We’re proud to support Lemon’s mission, its desire to scale and benefit its customers and ultimately the growth of the Bitcoin economy in Latin America and beyond.”