Blockchain firm Bitfury has come up with a novel product aimed at making it easier to pay for products with bitcoin. A specialized engineering team within the company has developed a coffee vending machine capable of connecting to the Lightning Network, a second-layer transaction protocol designed to make bitcoin more scalable by processing transactions off the main bitcoin blockchain.
As a result, the vending machine can accept bitcoin payments without charging high fees or requiring long transaction times, according to a press release. LightningPeach, the team behind the new vending machine, added a device capable of joining the network to a coffee machine that already sported some built-in smart components. The device is composed of a small Raspberry Pi computer and a unique circuit board designed by the team to process transactions.
Vasyl Grygorovych, LightningPeach’s head of community, told CoinDesk that the team’s strategic goal is to develop a real-world infrastructure for faster bitcoin payments.
“With a small computer and a chip, which is assembled by us or is easy to reproduce … it is much easier to pay with cryptocurrencies than with credit cards, because you don’t need your credit cards at all, you just need your mobile device,” he said.