Neutronpay, a Vancouver, Canada and Ho Chi Minh Metropolis, Vietnam based mostly startup that permits customers and companies to ship and obtain funds on Bitcoin’s Lightning Community raised USD$2.25M in Seed funding on June 1, 2022.
The Lightning Community is a “layer 2” fee protocol which sits atop Bitcoin and facilitates immediately settled funds measured in milliseconds, is able to thousands and thousands of transactions per second and permits for exceptionally low charges, which all mixed makes it the best fee community of any sort, interval. Lightning has the potential to interchange all debit, credit score and wire transactions globally. Due to its interoperability anybody with a Lightning enabled app may spend or ship funds in native foreign money at any service provider or individual worldwide. On-line, in-store, cross-border, micro, real-time, Lightning can do it!
The spherical was led by Hivemind Ventures with extra funding coming from enterprise corporations Republic, Cavalry, Experience Wave, Studio, Iterative, Fulgur Ventures and particular person traders Invoice Crowley (former Chief Product Officer – Hyperwallet) and Lisa Shields (Founder & former CEO – Hyperwallet *Acquired by PayPal).
The funding has helped with extra headcount throughout numerous departments, with a concentrate on additional growth of enterprise APIs, quickly to be rolled out cell shopper app, gross sales & advertising and marketing and compliance.
Based in 2018 by CEO Albert Buu, Neutronpay is the primary Lightning firm with an preliminary concentrate on Vietnam’s 100m individual inhabitants, with extra nations to comply with all through South East Asia.
With a inhabitants of 680M individuals, South East Asia’s economic system and monetary system have seen super development over the previous 20 years, however with 70% of the inhabitants being underbanked, and 50% being unbanked, some 340M individuals are nonetheless being fully omitted of the digital economic system.
“Being born and raised in Canada, I’ve been fortunate sufficient to be a part of first world monetary infrastructure. However I knew that going to Vietnam the place my dad and mom and remainder of my household are from I may make a distinction by introducing them to the Lightning Community and all that it may present to the individuals of the nation. Making the transfer to Vietnam three years in the past was my dedication to following by way of on this imaginative and prescient. Laying the infrastructure for Lightning throughout South East Asia would make it very simple for locals to higher transact with one another and for the remainder of the world to transact within the area whether or not whereas on trip or for doing enterprise,” Albert Buu was quoted as saying.
Led by a core group with backgrounds in funds, banking, compliance, and former ventures within the crypto business, Neutronpay is nicely suited to the duty at hand.
Neutronpay COO, Malcolm Weed, had this to say, “having seen the native and cross border funds landscapes from our time at Hyperwallet, Albert and I imagine the Lightning Community shall be a fee rail which shall be utilized in our on a regular basis lives, whether or not you’re shopping for groceries, sending funds overseas to a member of the family or paying for film tickets on-line. We’ve been having superb conversations for the reason that starting of the 12 months with all kinds of worldwide companies not simply in South East Asia who wish to leverage our APIs. They love the truth that the Lightning Community helps Bitcoin funds, but additionally USD stablecoins by This autumn 2022, and in addition the power to ship fiat funds whereas not being uncovered to Bitcoin volatility however nonetheless get the advantages of the fee rail. Over the subsequent few quarters we are going to share our progress with everybody as we onboard a number of enterprise use-cases utilizing Lightning.”
The Lightning Community has seen super development for the reason that fall of 2021 when El Salvador launched their nationwide Bitcoin pockets with a Lightning integration in order that customers may spend immediately at retailers throughout the nation. Twitter adopted with Lightning tipping, Cashapp launched Lightning in January 2022 and Robinhood introduced in April their intentions to launch Lightning as nicely. This is smart seeing as how each co-founders and CEOs Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Block/Cashapp) and Vald Tenev (Robinhood) have been early traders in Lightning Labs and are believers in the way forward for the Lightning Community.