Today, Strike announced a global initiative to bring its Lightning Network payments application worldwide.
After a successful U.S. launch in 2020 and the announcement of its payday solution last week, Strike is rolling out its services to 200-plus countries. Through a partnership with Bittrex, Strike will onboard the exchange’s more than one million customers across the globe. Strike will first add support for the euro, british pound, swiss franc, tether and USDC, with more currency pairs to follow.
On its face, this might look like another slick payments app, which it is, but it’s also much more. Strike enters the global remittances business with the hope of not only disrupting the incumbents but bringing free and instant international transfers with physicality.
Strike founder Jack Mallers told us that this is his most proud launch to date and that he’s most excited about bringing this service to areas that rely heavily on remittances to create stores of value. To elaborate, he shared a typical remittance use case for El Salvador.
Many citizens of El Salvador do not have access to traditional banking and their local currency is being heavily devalued. For those reasons, they often use the U.S. dollar as their money of choice and rely heavily on remittance services such as Western Union. These traditional services are slow, and riddled with fees which eat into the dollars these customers desperately need. Add onto that the fact that local gangs frequent these remittance locations and prey on customers to hand over their cash or else and there are clear inefficiencies in the system.
Strike fixes this.
As Strike enters the El Salvador market, for instance, customers will be able to send global payments instantly and for free thanks to the Lightning Network.
“This is the next advancement in money,” said Mallers.
Bitcoin has international liquidity, markets are open 24/7 and Lightning makes payments near instantaneous. This is a powerful combination that will disrupt the incumbents and deliver next-generation financial services to many people across the globe who have been left behind.
Strike has beta testers around the globe and the service is working flawlessly. It plans on rolling the service out globally, but this will happen in waves. It will first support the largest EU countries and El Salvador, which Mallers hand picked.
To get started, users can register at global.strike.me. Countries with the most registrations will be onboarded first.