In this article about the Lightning Network, we explain a few basics and what Lightning is all about. If you are hearing the term Lightning for the first time, we recommend reading the article first.

With the Lightning Network, the topic of addresses is somewhat more complicated than with simple Bitcoin wallets. There are a variety of different address formats. You can find out more in this article.

We are working hard to make Lightning payouts available to all users, currently there are only a few selected beta testers. In the first step, the payouts are limited to the address formats "Lightning-Address" and "LNURL-Pay". These formats look like the following example:

Lightning address: alice@coinfinity.co

LNURL-Pay: LNURL1DP68GURN8GHJ7MRW9E6XJURN9UH8WETVDSKKKMN0WAHZ7MRWW4EXCUP0DAHXCETFDEJHXJAAZ37

If required, you can find more details on the various formats here.

The big advantage of these formats is that the receiving user does not have to be online at the time of the payout. The user experience is then very similar to a normal purchase via Bitcoin On-Chain, with the small difference that an email address format or a static LNURL is inserted as the receiving address. For the time being, however, this is only possible for individual purchases and not yet for savings plans. This will follow in the next step.