Strike – a bitcoin payment company and money transfer app – announced on Friday that it is now available for download to more than 3 billion people around the world, including dozens of new countries.
The international expansion will allow wallet users in India, South Korea, Sri Lanka and other countries to exchange payments in USD and BTC.
Targeting Southern countries
Speaking at Bitcoin 2023 in Miami, Strike CEO Jack Mallers explain that the company’s expansion efforts were primarily aimed at those most in need of better payment tools and technologies.
“It’s a big part of the global south,” Mallers said. “The Global South has a lot to do with Bitcoin – they have a lot to say about where the world is headed.”
A non-exhaustive list of 47 supported countries featured during Mallers’ presentation included Bhutan, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, New Zealand, Paraguay and Uganda, alongside previously announced expansions like ArgentinaNigeria, Kenya and Ghana
In these countries, Strike leverages the Lightning Bitcoin Network to enable fast and immediate Bitcoin and dollar remittances around the world. Lightning is a Layer 2 network that bypasses Bitcoin’s base chain fees, which can increase at levels that make small transactions impossible when under stress.
Raising Strike’s global outreach was a two-and-a-half-year effort, which in part involved working with regulators in El Salvador’s Bitcoin office to create a licensing structure that allowed Bitcoin companies to operate legally. The nation was the first outside the United States to support Strike and is now home to the headquarters of Mallers’ E4 company.
Maller stressed the importance of giving the global south access to a “money app,” rather than an existing “exchange” like Binance, FTX, or Coinbase, which encourages “speculative gambling.”
“We want to compete with Binance,” Mallers said. “We know that the 3 billion people we serve – they got their first experience and their first Bitcoin from FTX, from Binance, from a lot of these exchanges that haven’t been fully proven to be reliable.”
Strike also now supports Lightning Address, which allows users to set up an email-like ID to send Bitcoins to them via Lightning, rather than using a QR code.
Previous Strike Announcements
Announcements at the Bitcoin conference have become something of a tradition for Mallers: in June 2021, he announced that El Salvador would make Bitcoin legal tender, which was an international first at the time.
In 2022, Mallers revealed at the same conference that his company was partnering with Shopify, as well as NCR – the largest point-of-sale payment provider in the United States. This would ideally allow Bitcoin Lightning Network users to pay with Bitcoin at popular stores like Walmart, McDonalds, Home Depot, and others.
Although unexpected obstacles have significantly delayed the full rollout of these plans, the company integrated with retail giant Clover in January.
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