On July 1, Bitcoin advocate and Lightning Network pioneer Jack Mallers, Founder and CEO of Bitcoin startup Zap Solutions, announced that his payments app Strike will soon have a Bitcoin Tab that will allow buying BTC directly from within the app.

Mallers is the man who announced early last month at the Bitcoin 2021 conference that the government of El Salvador had decided to make Bitcoin legal tender in the Central American nation.

Furthermore, he has been assisting the government of President Nayib Bukele in various way with the transition to full adoption of Bitcoin in El Salvador.

Well, earlier today (July 1), Mallers announced on his personal blog the Strike app’s upcoming feature — the “Bitcoin Tab” — that allows users of the BTC payments app to buy BTC directly from within app with close to zero cost of acquisition. However, Mallers is not just introducing this feature for the sake of offering one more venue for buying Bitcoin — he intends to make his Strike app “the cheapest and easiest place on the planet to acquire bitcoin.”

This new feature was launched today in a beta version of the app, and anyone interested in trying it out during the beta testing period is invited to join the waitlist by giving their email address.

Unlike Square’s Cash App or PayPal’s Venmo or Coinbase, which can charge, according to Mallers, up to around 3% as the fee for buying Bitcoin, he wants the users of the Strike app to be able to “buy bitcoin on Strike with no added fees” other than “the market-spread execution cost” charged to them by their execution partners. These costs are currently below 0.3%, and he expects that to “drop below 0.1% over the coming months” as their transaction volume increases.

He said:

“The more our volume grows, the less our partners charge. We’re committed to driving the price to buy bitcoin on Strike down to as close to zero as we possibly can.“

He then went on to say:

“We don’t need to charge users 2%-3% to buy bitcoin. Our innovation as a company comes in our ability to disrupt payments using the Bitcoin and Lightning network. The cost to acquire open-source money on an open network will inevitably be driven to zero, anyways. Why wait? Did you really expect me to undercut Venmo by a few basis points?… Buying bitcoin will not cost more than it takes to acquire.“

In case you are wondering how to pay for your BTC purchases with fiat currency, according to the Strike app’s FAQ page, you will need to link the app to your bank account.

Although the Bitcoin Tab feature will initially only allow buying BTC, in future, Mallers plans to add much more functionality to it

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

IMAGE CREDIT

Photo by “petre_barlea” via Pixabay