The launch of the Lightning payments app Strike in Argentina generated a lot of confusion on Twitter after customers started downloading and using it to find out they didn’t get an actual Bitcoin wallet. Despite the muddiness, however, the Strike launch there resembles the same dynamic the company resorted to in its first iteration in El Salvador, as it also uses the USDT stablecoin to represent U.S. dollars and interacts with Bitcoin and Lightning without holding a BTC balance.
Strike’s founder and CEO Jack Mallers flew to El Salvador early last year to aid the Bitcoin Beach community in leveraging the Bitcoin and Lightning networks to achieve financial freedom, only to discover that it was illegal for his app to custody U.S. dollars on behalf of a user. He explained to “What Bitcoin Did” host Peter McCormack that Strike, which leverages dollars and Bitcoin and Lightning to allow instant, cheap payment transfers worldwide without intermediaries, had to resort to using Tether’s USDT to achieve basic, minimum-viable-product functionality in El Salvador. Only after El Salvador passed the Bitcoin law was Strike able to pivot away from using the stablecoin.
