“Bitcoin’s achievement is being the only finite asset in the history of the universe. That’s a pretty big deal, and you should probably hold it.”
A central character behind El Salvador’s move to make Bitcoin legal tender, Jack Mallers was introduced to the world’s leading cryptocurrency by his father in 2013. It was only later, in 2017, that Mallers realized the potential of combining the security of the Bitcoin network with the faster transaction speeds facilitated by the Lightning Network. One of the youngest crypto entrepreneurs today, Mallers attained fame for founding Zap in the summer of 2017 as an intuitive noncustodial wallet to make payments over the Lightning Network. After tasting limited success, Zap launched Olympus to make purchasing Bitcoin more accessible.
However, since Olympus necessitated that its users hold their own Bitcoin, Mallers tweaked the product offering to eliminate the need for a cryptocurrency wallet or previous Bitcoin investing experience. Rebranding it as Strike in January 2020, Mallers and Zap have not looked back
Since. With Strike, users could use the Lightning Network by paying in fiat money only, thereby lowering the entry barrier to access Bitcoin as an alternative payment network. Thus, Mallers’ new venture ensures that investors do not have to deal with crypto volatility or taxes, establishing Strike as a fast, no-fee cross-border payment solution.
Known for his bubbly enthusiasm while talking about the long-term potential of Bitcoin, one of Mallers’ biggest bets was taking the lead in helping solve El Salvador’s remittance problems. He was instrumental in cementing Strike as the de facto payment solution in the country, where more than two-thirds of the population had no bank account, and he believed that Strike would be able to challenge credit card behemoths Visa and Mastercard soon.
Mallers remained one of the few crypto advocates openly professing their admiration of the Bitcoin network while shunning the need for other blockchain protocols scaling up transaction throughput at the expense of security. For him, Strike was already using the Lightning Network to transfer money in real time and was backed by Bitcoin’s immutable transaction recording capability.
In September, Strike raised $80 million from investors, such as Ten31 and endowment funds of Washington University and the University of Wyoming, with plans underway to use the funds to develop partnerships with retail businesses, such as Starbucks and Wendy’s. This came on the back of its collaborations with crypto exchange Bittrex and fintech provider Prime Trust in 2021 before Twitter adopted the Strike API in September 2021 to facilitate tipping with Bitcoin.
Mallers estimates that nearly half of all U.S. businesses could come on board with Strike by the end of 2023, underscoring his confidence in the company’s potential to disrupt the payments industry. While many may dismiss this as wishful thinking, it is important to note that Strike is already being adopted by companies such as Shopify and NCR.
Mallers has his sights firmly set on expanding Strike’s retail footprint, with the firm focusing on forging partnerships with payment companies such as Block and even PayPal in 2023. Despite Bitcoin recording lows in terms of price performance in 2022, Mallers remains supremely assertive that cryptocurrencies will only trend higher in the years to come as token and network demand increases rapidly with mass adoption.
