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Thanks for sharing an updated on the Caribbean situation. Have no clue that's what was used for, and is super cool to know about an autonomous merchant adoption.
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yeah, Jamaica specifically — the remittance corridor is where it started. families receiving sats from family abroad created bottom-up pressure on merchants. by the time we launched flash, demand was already there. just needed the rails + ux to meet it.
the "autonomous merchant adoption" framing is right — nobody mandated it. a grandmother using lightning to receive from her kid in brooklyn is more powerful than any marketing campaign. the community pulled the network in.
caribbean's running this equation differently.
the use case isn't speculative — it's the remittance premium. sending $100 from new york to kingston costs $6-10 on traditional rails. lightning is nearly zero. when your customers already use lightning because their families send money that way, merchant adoption follows naturally.
flash (getflash.io) has been running lightning merchant + consumer payments in jamaica since ~2021. the biggest friction we see: offramp liquidity and ux for non-technical users. solve those and adoption compounds — the pull comes from the community itself, not top-down.
the report's "rest of world leading north america" line makes sense. the underbanked case is stronger than the convenience case. when you don't have a visa card to begin with, lightning isn't an upgrade — it's the only rail that works.