The application for sending and receiving funds based on the Bitcoin Lightning Network, Strike, is at the top of the download list within the category of financial applications in El Salvador.
As reported by the Documenting Bitcoin Twitter account, the Strike platform, developed by the company Zap Solutions and directed by Jack Mallers, a few weeks after its launch, already enjoys great popularity in the Central American nation for being the sixth country that receives the most remittances. from United States.
The platform is above applications of financial institutions in El Salvador. Strike’s superiority could be due to the fact that remittances have no costs when they are sent from the United States, unlike the giant PayPal, which charges high commissions and is in fourth place on the list of downloads.
Strike first began operations outside of the United States in late March of this year. On that occasion, Mallers reported through a statement collected by CriptoNoticias that his intention to begin operations in El Salvador is due to his “ability to offer financial tools to emerging markets.”
Other characteristics of El Salvador that attracted Strike developers were that in that country “there are no supporting financial regulations, they do not have supporting fintech banking infrastructure, they do not have peer-to-peer applications, among others,” he said. the CEO.
The goal of Strike is to make it easy to send dollars for free anywhere in the world. For this, it uses the Lightning Network and the Bitcoin network, thus offering instant payments because exchanges through the channels do not need block confirmations. It is designed to be user-friendly since they do not have to learn anything about Bitcoin or find out that they are using this network to send money.
Strike reaches 200 countries
At the beginning of January, Strike announced that it had reached an agreement with the Bittrex exchange to offer support to users in more than 200 countries. The platform already incorporates operations with euros, pounds, Swiss francs and the stablecoins Tether (USDT) and USDC.
Jack Mallers highlighted that the platform already has a significant number of users and that it processes a volume of millions of dollars each month.
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network already has a leading role in El Salvador
In December 2020, bitcoin transactions on the Lightning Network reached a record number during a sports and gastronomic festival organized by the Bitcoin Beach social project in El Salvador.
More than 2,000 bitcoin transactions were carried out in the event in just eight hours, with about 1,400 people participating
The activity served to test the project’s purse, but also as an economic boost for local entrepreneurs.
