Block, the payments firm known for Cash App and its lightweight merchant terminals, has long held Bitcoin on its balance sheet. Now, the company is taking its support for Bitcoin a step further by deploying part of its crypto holdings to support the Lightning network, a so-called layer-2 system that makes Bitcoin payments faster and cheaper.
On Thursday, Block announced a new business line it's calling "c=" that will entail the company taking a portion of the over 10,000 Bitcoins it holds in its corporate treasury and storing them on the Lightning network. In doing so, Block will serve as a liquidity provider on the fledgling network, which is constructed of a series of peer-to-peer channels where transactions are conducted apart from the primary Bitcoin blockchain, and then later recorded on the main chain.
