Strike, a Bitcoin payments company and remittance app, has announced that it is now available for download in over 47 countries worldwide. This international expansion will allow wallet users in several countries, including India, South Korea, and Sri Lanka, to remit payments to one another in both USD and BTC. The company leverages the Bitcoin lightning network to enable fast and immediate Bitcoin and dollar-based remittances worldwide. This article explores Strike’s expansion efforts and its plans to provide better payment tools and technology to countries that need it most.
Global outreach for Strike
Strike’s global outreach was a two-and-a-half-year effort, which partly involved working with regulators in El Salvador’s Bitcoin Office to create a licensing structure for Bitcoin companies to legally operate. The nation was the first, besides the United States, to support Strike, and is now home to the headquarters of Mallers’ company E4. The company’s expansion efforts were primarily targeted towards countries that needed better payment tools and technology the most, which included many countries in the global south.
Strike CEO, Jack Mallers, stated that 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.” He added that the company wants to compete with Binance, knowing that the 3 billion people they serve got their first experience and their first Bitcoin from exchanges that haven’t been entirely proven to be trustworthy.
Lightning Address and other developments
Strike also now supports Lightning Address, which lets users set up an email-like identifier for sending them Bitcoin over lightning, rather than using a QR code. The company’s expansion includes dozens of new countries, including Bhutan, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, New Zealand, Paraguay, and Uganda, alongside formerly announced expansions like Argentina, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana.
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 let users of Bitcoin’s lightning network pay with Bitcoin at popular stores like Walmart, McDonald’s, Home Depot, and others. Even though unexpected obstacles have severely delayed the full rollout of those plans, the company integrated with POS giant Clover in January.
The international expansion of Strike will provide better payment tools and technology to countries that need it the most. Strike’s expansion into over 47 countries shows the company’s commitment to giving the global south access to a “money app” rather than an existing exchange. The company’s use of the Bitcoin lightning network to enable fast and immediate Bitcoin and dollar-based remittances worldwide is a significant development in the world of Bitcoin payments.