Breez makes it easier to pay with bitcoin

It would be tempting to write an advertising slogan for payments startup Breez that simply says, “Pay with bitcoin? It’s a Breez,” referring to the English idiom “it’s a breeze” meaning something that is very easy to do. That is certainly the intention behind Breez’s new feature allowing lightning-based bitcoin purchases directly from its mobile app, as reported by Coindesk.

The feature, made possible thanks to a partnership with fiat-to-crypto broker MoonPay, is available to users in 35 countries, and according to the company, it simplifies the currently long-winded procedure for lightning payments.

While buying lightning directly with a credit card sounds like a simple feature, Breez claims this functionality hasn’t been possible before now.

Breez CEO and co-founder Roy Sheinfeld told CoinDesk: “Breez is not just a wallet. It’s a lightning payment service that aims to provide a holistic experience. Breez’s goal is to take the lightning technology and infrastructure and expose it in an experience regular folks could use with compromising on the bitcoin values. Other [lightning] wallets are less UX focused.”

Until now, if users wanted to buy lightning, they would need to buy bitcoin, move that bitcoin to a wallet that supports lightning, then wait for that transaction to go through. According to Coindesk, the industry standard is to wait for roughly an hour to make sure the transaction is final. The new Breez feature removes one of those steps by buying lightning directly within a wallet.

Breez’s new feature is part of a growing effort to make lightning payments less arcane for the average person.

“Going into a website and going through cumbersome process just to top up your wallet with a hundred bucks is not the UX we want to provide. We aim to provide a UX that is at least on-par with fiat,” Sheinfeld said.

Breez doesn’t require users to provide personal information for monthly purchases up to a total of 150 euro. But for amounts larger than that, it requires users to prove their identity under KYC rules.