Will Twitter integrate the bitcoin layer 2 payments protocol Lightning Network? CEO and Founder Jack Dorsey seemed to indicate as much on the social media platform this week, CoinDesk reported on Friday (June 11).
Soon after Dorsey tweeted his appreciation for Sphinx Chat, a messaging app powered by the Lightning Network, a follower asked him for the network to be built into Twitter. Dorsey replied that it was “only a matter of time.”
The Lightning Network is a layer above the bitcoin blockchain, designed to allow for quicker, cheaper transactions by creating user-generated channels to send and receive payments.
“It is unclear what an integration with Twitter would bring,” noted CoinDesk. “One possibility is the use of micropayments, for which Twitter-enabled solutions have been developed.”
This is far from the first time Dorsey has publicly displayed his bitcoin/cryptocurrency fandom. Square, the FinTech payments company led by Dorsey, announced last fall that it had invested $50 million to purchase 4,709 bitcoins.
In February, Dorsey tweeted a photo of his computer running bitcoin “node” software. A node helps validate cryptocurrency transactions and stores the blockchain records of every digital currency exchange. Then in March, Dorsey auctioned off the first-ever tweet as a non-fungible token, part of a larger NFT craze that has since apparently died down a bit.
And last week, the Twitter head said Square was considering making a hardware wallet for bitcoin, which caused Square shares to rise. “If we do it, we would build it entirely in the open, from software to hardware design, and in collaboration with the community,” Dorsey said.