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Showing posts with the label remittances

Crypto could eliminate 97% of traditional remittance fees: Coinbase

U.S. consumers sending international bank transfers pay more than $12 billion annually in remittance fees alone. A recent blog post from cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase indicates the vast majority of U.S. remittance fees for international transfers wouldn’t apply to similar transactions conducted using cryptocurrency.  According to the exchange’s research, “The US average fee rate of 6.18%, means Americans' average yearly spend is likely close to $12 billion on remittance fees.” The post goes on to state that the average transaction time for such remittances ranges from one to 10 days, while similar cryptocurrency transactions usually take around 10 minutes. Remittance Payments represent a sort of ‘double whammy’ for international transactions as, typically, they require both a sending fee and a conversion fee to exchange between currencies. Cryptocurrency transactions, however, tend to cost significantly less. Per Coinbase, Bitcoin (BTC) transaction fees average approximately...

Bitcoin Lightning Network growth is organic, coming from real-world adoption

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Bitcoin Lightning Network adoption receives a boost with the launch of USD payments and decentralized social media platform, Nostr. Bitcoin’s Lightning Network (LN) capacity recently surpassed an all-time high of 5,000 BTC.  The Lightning Network is a neutral protocol built on top of Bitcoin and currently it does not have a “native” token attached to it like many decentralized finance platforms. Although the Lightning Network’s total liquidity is less than 0.5% of the ETH in DeFi contracts, the uptrend in Bitcoin’s LN capacity versus a downtrend in the amount of ETH locked in smart contracts is encouraging for LN development. Total ETH locked in DeFi contracts (top) and total BTC in Lightning Network channels (bottom). Source: DefiLlama While the liquidity on the LN has been rising consistently, the number of channels on the peer-to-peer network dropped drastically in November following the FTX collapse. It could be due to an exodus of miners operating LN nodes besides running mining ...