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Squares merchants adopt square, square adopts lightning... So by transitive properties those merchants have adopted lightning.
That's all there is to it, adoption.
Is Square the only provider or are there other options for merchants?
A merchant can ultimately just use any Lightning wallet, Zeus for example has had NFC and a POS interface for awhile iirc... it's just not commonly used.
Some merchants run BTCPayServer, I believe there are POS interfaces for that.
Steak n' Shake has been using Speed wallet, idk if they use NFC though... don't have one in my region to go try it.
The original Breeze had a POS interface iirc too, but has since burnt out of Lightning and pivoted to wrapping fake L2 middleware for neobanks.
For other Lightning wallets with POS interfaces that don't have NFC, it's a pretty simple thing that AI could probably one-shot if requested.
Reality is there's not enough merchants in the meatspace demanding this stuff, and we're probably still a long way out from that. Sales != savings, and Bitcoin is above all savings technology. What matters for merchants at the end of the month is being in the green, then they can put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Accepting Lightning doesn't meaningfully impact their bottom line or how much Bitcoin they can put on their balance sheet (sales in Bitcoin are still subject to costs of goods sold)
ACT 1 for Lightning, as the native money of the internet, is machine to machine or app to app payments where fiat is either too cost prohibitive, permissioned, or chargeback-risk is exceptionally high (things like granular cloud services and ad-hoc API's for example). These are not real problems for coffee carts.
Now, Square makes a spread regardless the mode of payment. The merchant is their customer, not the consumer. Their margins are probably higher with Lightning than with fiat since they don't have permissioning costs with Visa etc. That is their incentive to ship it.
Maybe Toast will see the same thing and copy Square, and that will double accepting merchants, but again... but that type of adoption is transitive rather than grassroots.
With ShockWallet, we're focused on ACT 1, because once the tooling is good enough for internet merchants, meatspace merchants will more readily follow.
There's no full stack that is made to bolt on to existing line of business applications (inventory, reporting etc), that's tooling immaturity rather than a technical blocker, and the requisite foundation for POS.
Great to see many options. Are you then saying I can go to Steak n' Shake, tap and pay with my Zeus wallet via NFC is my phone has the sensor?
don't have one in my region to go try it
In theory, that's a question for Speed/S&S as far as actual implementation
But, the technology exists, the question is of merchant agency
the issue is then on the POS providers adopting bitcoin and making it available to merchants? Something like Square did?