American rapper Lil Pump has started accepting bitcoin payments via Lightning Network on his official merchandise store.
Lil Pump is a Colombian-American nominated this year by Forbes among the 30 Under 30 in the music field, with over 1 million followers on Twitter, over 15 million subscribers to his YouTube channel and almost 3 billion views.
He became famous in 2017 thanks to the Gucci Gang piece that reached third place in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and whose video has exceeded 900 million views on YouTube.
Recently, the LightningNetworkStores site, which lists various sites where you can make purchases by paying in BTC via Lightning Network, has included in its list Unhappy.com, which is the official e-commerce of the artist.
When purchasing, bitcoin appears among the various possible payment options.
If you select the bitcoin option, you are offered the choice of paying via a conventional wallet or a Lightning Network channel.
Selecting one of the two choices generates an address and a QR code to be scanned in order to make the payment in BTC.
Forbes reports that this decision of the rapper could be linked to the recent price increase of BTC, after the lows reached in December 2018, and that, unlike other similar initiatives, that of Lil Pump would be more likely to generate profits.
In fact, his audience is very young, and according to recent surveys, young people are more open to bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and decentralised services.
Lil Pump, who’s birth name is Gazzy Garcia, is 19 years old and well represents his generation, that is to say the generation of the digital natives: he was born in 2000, and like all digital natives he is used to using dematerialised digital money, especially for online purchases.
Moreover, the choice to allow crypto payments only in bitcoin, and via Lightning Network, suggests that those who manage his e-commerce site, or himself, have some non-superficial knowledge of these technologies.
