Former Facebook Payments executive David Marcus said that BTC will become the most critical network leading the payment industry into a new era. He also mentioned that the global payment infrastructure is outdated and will benefit from integration with crypto assets in the future.
During an interview with CNBC's Squawk Box, the former Facebook and PayPal executive discussed his new project, Lightspak. The company was founded to provide a second-layer solution for BTC, specifically payment settlement services on the Lightning Network.
This payment solution allows users to send funds "off-chain," improving the scalability of the BTC network. In this sense, Marcus and his company aim to turn crypto assets into a "truly global payment network."
Their goal is to connect everyone financially, regardless of nationality, access to traditional payment channels, or other limiting factors. The former executive also claims that this will enable people to communicate in a similar way as using email, text messages, and other internet-supported communication methods.
When it comes to the problems the company wants to solve and why it wants to build on the BTC network, Marcus expressed the following views:
"If you stop one of them (tourists visiting the US) and want to communicate with them, you can ask them for their email address, and within the next minute, you can easily send them an email. You can send them a text message, have a video chat with them, but if you want to send them money, you can't. Therefore, we are still in the era of fax payments, and that's the problem we want to solve."
Marcus believes that the world lacks a universal currency protocol, and BTC and the Lightning Network are the solutions. The current payment system is complex, and people have to overcome multiple obstacles to transfer money between countries or to each other.
If Lightspark and other Lightning Network-based companies can provide a simple solution for the public, they have the opportunity to enter a trillion-dollar field and take market share from SWIFT and other international payment networks.
Although BTC has been in a downward trend since reaching an all-time high of $69,000 in 2021, the Lightning Network has been growing. Data from the Crypto asset analysis platform mempool.space shows that the payment capacity of the second-layer solution has increased to over 4,700 BTC.
The chart above shows that this indicator has been rising since October 2020, when the payment capacity was much lower than 1,000 BTC. If this trend continues, the payment capacity of the Lightning Network may double in the next two years.
