Voltage’s Aaron Bollinger said that Lightning payments are already being rolled out across Jack Dorsey’s Square network.
Bitcoin’s next major leap isn’t another new blockchain, it’s speed, scale, and usability on the original one.
That’s the view of Aaron Bollinger, co-founder of Voltage, a U.S.-based Bitcoin infrastructure firm pioneering scalable payments on the Lightning Network.
Speaking with TheStreet Roundtable’s Alp Gasimov, Bollinger explained how Voltage helps businesses transact in Bitcoin at lightning speed literally.
“The problem with Bitcoin today, to buy a cup of coffee, is that it could take 35 minutes and a $2 fee just to buy the $2 cup of coffee,” he said. “With Lightning, you can buy that cup of coffee with Bitcoin or soon Tether. It’ll happen in two seconds and it will have a near-zero cost, even less than Visa or MasterCard.”
Founded in 2020, Voltage offers cloud-based Lightning infrastructure for enterprises, providing scalable, API-ready payment channels for fintech firms, merchants, and developers. Think of it as “Amazon Web Services for Bitcoin payments.”
For Bollinger, Bitcoin’s decentralization, not speculation, remains its defining feature.
“Anybody can spin up a new blockchain or token,” he said. “But the special circumstances that happened with Bitcoin, where it reached global acceptance without a CEO or company, that’s the feature. Nobody controls it, so therefore we all control it.”
That principle, he says, underpins why Lightning and Layer 2 solutions matter: “They’re a way to do transactions on the original Bitcoin blockchain, the mother of all of this, but with modern speeds.”
And adoption is accelerating fast.
“Jack Dorsey’s Block, which owns Square, will have Lightning payments available at 100% of their point of sale by December 31,” Bollinger revealed. “Every third coffee shop from New York to Los Angeles runs on Square. So all of us watching are gonna be able to buy a cup of coffee over Lightning, over Bitcoin, by the end of the year.”
For Bollinger, that’s when Bitcoin stops being “digital gold” and starts becoming digital cash. “It’s not just an investment thesis,” he said. “It’s actually a technology that I can use day to day to run my life, and I’d rather do it on Bitcoin than on some blockchain run by a guy somewhere that I don’t trust.”
