Bitcoin application Strike expands support to 3 billion people, targeting developing countries

Strike, a bitcoin payment company and remittance application, announced on Friday that it is now available for download for over 3 billion people worldwide, including dozens of new countries.

The international expansion will enable wallet users in India, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and other countries to make payments in dollars and bitcoin.

Targeting the Global South

Speaking at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami, Strike CEO Jack Mallers explained that the company’s expansion efforts are primarily focused on those who most need better payment tools and technology.

The list of 47 supported countries presented during Mallers’ presentation included Bhutan, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, New Zealand, Paraguay, and Uganda, along with previously announced expansions such as Argentina, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana.

Within these countries, Strike utilizes the bitcoin lightning network to enable fast and instant remittances in bitcoin and dollars worldwide. Lightning is a layer 2 network that bypasses fees on the bitcoin base chain, which can rise to levels that make small transactions unfeasible during peak usage times.

Strike’s global reach has been a two-year effort, which partially involved collaboration with regulators in El Salvador to create a licensing framework for bitcoin companies. The nation was the first outside the U.S. to support Strike, and is now home to Mallers’ company E4.

Mallers emphasized the importance of providing access to southern countries to a ‘money app’, rather than existing exchanges like Binance, FTX, or Coinbase, which promote ‘speculative gambling’.

– “We want to compete with Binance. We know that the 3 billion people we serve got their first experience and their first bitcoin from FTX, Binance, and many exchanges that have not been fully proven as reliable,” said Mallers.

Strike also now supports a lightning address, which allows users to set up an identifier similar to an email for sending bitcoin instead of using a QR code.

Previous Announcements from Strike

Announcements at the Bitcoin conference have become somewhat of a tradition for Mallers. In June 2021, he announced that El Salvador would declare bitcoin legal tender.

Mallers revealed in 2022 at the same conference that his company was partnering with Shopify, as well as NCR, the largest point-of-sale payment provider in the U.S. This would allow users of the bitcoin lightning network to pay with bitcoin at popular stores like Walmart, McDonald’s, Home Depot, and others.

Although unexpected obstacles have significantly delayed the full rollout of these plans, the company integrated with the POS company Clover in January.