Zap, the Lightning startup behind a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet, has raised $3.5 million in a seed round in April. As reported by Forbes on July 15, previously undiscovered filings by the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission revealed Zap raised $3.5 million in the April seed round with investors including Green Oaks Capital and Morgan Creek Digital, co-founded by Bitcoin bull Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano. What is Zap? A non-custodial wallet, Zap stands out from others by enabling users to instantly purchase Bitcoin (BTC) using a U.S. bank account via the Lightning Network. Zap CEO Jack Mallers is the grandson of Bill …

Pioneering crypto payments service BitPay has revealed that Bitcoin still overwhelmingly dominates payments and that it has no plans to use second layer solutions like the Lightning or Liquid networks. Bitcoin is often criticised as a payment method because it is slow — the network can process just a handful of transactions per second — and expensive (the transaction fee recently topped $6) but it remains the preferred payment method on BitPay. “As of March, Bitcoin continues to be both the largest and most popular crypto asset representing over 95% of transactions by volume for BitPay,” the company’s Chief Marketing …

Researchers from the Norwegian University and the University of Luxembourg have published a research paper detailing an attack that can deanonymize transactions broadcast across Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. The Lightning Network emerged as a controversial compromise from the Bitcoin (BTC) block limit and scalability debate. It’s a second layer solution that facilitates near-instant, low-cost Bitcoin transactions. Proponents claim it offers privacy by implementing segregated witness (SegWit). University students crack Lightning channel balances Four researchers from universities in Norway and Luxembourg including Bitcoin, along with Lightning community developer Ren Pickhardt, contributed to the research. The academics claim to have used transfer routing …