Voltage, an infrastructure provider, made it possible for African fintech company Chipper Cash to process more than half of its Bitcoin transfers on the Lightning Network. Millions of people across the continent will be users of this powerful layer-two payment system, one of the most important sector applications.
The shift to the Lightning Network is driven by a demand for more efficient payment rails in markets where traditional financial services can be unreliable. According to Maijid Moujaled, Co-Founder and President of Chipper Cash, the integration helps provide greater financial access.
“Voltage’s reliable infrastructure reduces the complexity of building on Lightning, allowing us to focus on scale,” Moujaled said in a statement. “With Voltage, Lightning can truly become the backbone for global, real-time payments by delivering near-instant settlement at low cost.”
This adoption has grown organically among Chipper Cash’s user base of more than seven million customers, spreading through word-of-mouth without a major marketing push. The partnership allows Chipper Cash to leverage Voltage’s API to help its operations.
Graham Krizek, CEO of Voltage, noted the significance of the development for emerging economies. “What Chipper Cash is doing with Lightning proves that emerging markets can leapfrog outdated payment rails,” Krizek stated. “They’ve unlocked instant, global, and low-cost payments that work every time, everywhere.”
The integration enables interoperability with other major Lightning-powered applications, such as Strike and Cash App, connecting African users to a broader global payments ecosystem. This functionality is central to new products like Chessa, a service from Chipper Cash that allows users to send remittances with crypto that can be received in over 25 fiat currencies.
This group work is a great example of how useful the Bitcoin Lightning Network can be when used on a large scale. The following partners are showing a better use case of the system. For the crypto industry as a whole, this successful deployment in Africa shows that real-world problems can we solved with technology.