Lightspark is a payments infrastructure company founded by David Marcus (formerly of PayPal, Meta, and Diem) in 2022. They aim to build what they call the "Money Grid," a global, open payment network using Bitcoin as a neutral settlement layer and leveraging Lightning for high-speed transfers.

Their target audience includes enterprises—digital banks, fintechs, wallets, exchanges—that need to move money across currencies and jurisdictions instantly and cheaply, as well as developers building Bitcoin-native payment applications or self-custodial wallets that need scalable infrastructure.

What sets Lightspark apart is their end-to-end product integration, combining seamless liquidity management, intelligent routing, compliance-ready infrastructure, and human-friendly Universal Money Address (UMA) tech. This abstraction lets banks, wallets, exchanges, and businesses effortlessly send and receive fiat or crypto globally without having to manage Lightning channels, cross-border FX, or complex on-chain details. These tools have already seen traction with big partners.

Looking forward, Lightspark's vision is to scale the Money Grid globally—connecting all real-time payment systems and making Bitcoin native rails for everything from everyday consumer transfers to B2B fiat-fiat flows. Spark aims to resolve key Lightning limitations like self-custody economic scalability and lacks native token support. By building Spark open-source and fully backward compatible with Lightning, they hope to decentralize stablecoin issuance on Bitcoin and finally realize high-velocity, global Bitcoin-based payment settlement.