Jack Mallers: Strike is the Game Changer

Jack Mallers is the founder and visionary behind Strike, a popular U.S. payment app actively used for swift digital transactions on the Bitcoin Lightning Network. He was born in Chicago in 1994 to a lineage of financiers. His grandfather served as the chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade, and his father founded one of the largest futures brokerage firms in the city. As a result, Jack began to understand the fundamentals of economics and stock trading while still being a teenager.

More than a trading career, however, Jack was excited about two things: chess and programming. He dropped out of St. John's University in New York and enrolled in Starter School, a renowned institution for Chicago's top programmers. 

Jack's parents, Bill and Brooke Mallers, were early investors in Bitcoin. Therefore, it's not surprising that the first independent project of the 23-year-old was related to cryptocurrency.

In 2017, Jack Mallers introduced Zap — a wallet for payments on the Lightning Network. It was marketed as a tool for transactions related to the purchase/sale of legal medical cannabis. At the time, private medical facilities frequently faced refusals from traditional banks to provide services to companies involved in the cultivation and sale of cannabis. The complication was that each U.S. state independently decides whether to legalize cannabis within its borders. Dispensaries were often forced to rely on cash payments, which complicated their operations significantly.

While the project initially launched for a few dispensaries, it soon evolved into something more than just a wallet for cannabis payments. Jack Mallers transformed the Zap app into a comprehensive fiat-to-digital converter with the help of Olympus. However, to utilize this capability, cryptocurrency was still needed to pay the fees.

That's when Jack Mallers decided to develop Strike — a fundamentally new service that allows the use of BTC as a payment method with zero fees. In 2022, he introduced it, revolutionizing the traditional money movement trajectory.

Strike is a mobile app that leverages the Bitcoin Lightning Network for instant transactions. With Strike linked to a bank account, users can pay for goods and services or tip content creators without fees. Given that millions of individuals and businesses use the app, one can now buy a cup of coffee or gas for their car in BTC in the U.S. The platform can also be used to buy/sell bitcoins and convert the salary into BTC. Accounts can be linked anywhere in the U.S., except for Hawaii and New York.

The app supports only one coin (BTC) and one currency (U.S. dollar) and is immensely popular in America. By launching Strike, Jack Mallers hit the jackpot: the crypto community had long sought the ability to make micro-transactions in BTC, but the slow and expensive blockchain of the premier cryptocurrency hindered such opportunities. 

Now, the app has several million active users, and Jack enjoys his multimillionaire status.

In May 2023, Jack Mallers announced a massive global expansion for the Strike app. At the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami, he shared his ambition to enter the markets of 65 countries and support approximately 3 billion users. El Salvador, where Bitcoin is recognized as an official payment method and where banking systems operate slowly and inefficiently, is of primary interest to him. He's also keen on Mexico and Nigeria, where the cryptocurrency turnover matches that of fiat currencies. 

Seeing how rapidly Strike has gained momentum in the U.S., there's little doubt Jack Mallers will succeed in his ventures.