Visa to be replaced by lightning network offered by US retail gaints

The retail giant, Kroger is an Ohio based retailing firm founded in 1883 and for years they have been accepting Visa credit cards at its chain of Smith’s food and drug stores. Anthony Pompliano tweeted an offer to hook them up with Bitcoin’s Lightning Network across all their stores.

This last week Kroger announced they no longer accept Visa credit cards claiming that the fees were too much. Smith’s chain totals to over 20,000 employees at 134 food and drug stores across seven states in the US.

The CFO at Kroger, Mike Schlotman explained that the card fees charged by Visa are a lot higher at Smith’s than any other credit card brand saying, “Visa has been misusing its position and charging retailers excessive fees for a long time.”

Visa is actually behind the increased fees for the banks processing card payments on behalf of merchants in April.

Under the circumstances, it only seemed natural for someone to eventually crop up and suggest an alternative through cryptocurrency. Pompliano was that someone.

One of the product managers at Kroger Digital responded to the tweet saying, “Hey Pomp - I'm a Product Manager at Kroger Digital. Can confirm that Yael is the correct person to discuss this with. I would love to set up a conversation.” Pomp was quick to respond saying “DM me. Let’s do it”.

The Ripple army got involved and questioned the preparedness of the Lightning Network and suggested that XRP is a much better alternative. More interestingly though is that someone suggested that selling a Smith’s gift card on BitRefill, which would almost definitely make a zero effort stop-gap solution.