Intro
Strike is a new crypto payment app by the creators of Zap (a Bitcoin Lightning wallet). The vision is to create a simple payments app resembling something like Venmo. The big difference is that users transact in Bitcoin over the Lightning Network without even realizing it!
Strike is great for people who want to use crypto, but don't want to deal with the headaches of buying crypto, paying network fees and calculating crypto capital gains taxes. Strike handles all of this for you behind the scenes.
Considering Strike is brand new and still in beta, the overall experience was extremely polished. We ran into a few bugs and struggles, but hopefully these kinks will all be worked out soon.
Things we love
💚 Clean minimalist design
💚 Tiered KYC only requests (legally required) information as it's needed
Things we dislike
💔 Some of the debit cards we tried connecting were denied
💔 You have to deposit money into the app before you can pay someone
💔 While it's not Strike's fault, a lot of personal information is required before you can make your first payment
Dimension | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|
🚀🚀🚀🚀 | There's a lot of steps to signup and get going. Unfortunately all the information collection is required by law, but Strike makes it as painless as possible. | |
🚀🚀🚀🚀 | Clearly a lot of love went into making the user experience as simple as possible. | |
🚀🚀🚀 | The app is incredibly minimalist design, which is easy on the eyes. | |
🚀🚀🚀🚀 | At the time of this review, the desktop app was updated 7 days ago, the iPhone app was updated today and the Android app 3 days ago. That's some real time updates! | |
🚀🚀🚀🚀 | We hopped into Strike's Slack channel and got immediate support from the founder! They also actively reply to users on Twitter and can be reached at support@strike.me | |
🚀🚀🚀🚀 | iPhone, Android and a Chrome extension. What else could we ask for? | |
🚀🚀 | Security is hardly mentioned. Bank account connection via Plaid is industry standard and you punch your debit card directly into their payment processor's web page so not too much to be worried about there. | |
🚀🚀🚀 | The Zap Slack channel seems pretty active with people troubleshooting lightning network integrations and experiences with the Strike beta. | |
🚀🚀🚀🚀 | The lightning network is bleeding edge tech. To build their entire infrastructure on lightning takes guts, but if anyone can do it they can. | |
🚀🚀🚀 | Creating a public profile is a cool way to easily accept payments from anyone who visits and downloads the app. |
Rating definitions
🚀 - Terrible. Dimension ignored.
🚀🚀 - Okay. Needs love.
🚀🚀🚀 - Great! Nice job.
🚀🚀🚀🚀 - Excellent! Above & beyond!
Specification | Detail | Notes |
|---|---|---|
iPhone App | ✅ | |
Android App | ✅ | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=zapsolutions.strike |
Web / Desktop App | ✅ | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/strike/ddlakobiikmpnaeakgbdeodclnmiablf |
Bitcoin | 🚫 | You can't deposit/withdraw Bitcoin, but it's being used behind the scenes. |
Ethereum | 🚫 | No Ethereum integration. And given the team, their likely never will be. |
Alt Coins | 🚫 | |
Crypto Trading | 🚫 | |
Website | ✅ | |
Twitter | ✅ | |
Reddit | 🚫 | |
Podcast Interviews | ✅ | https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/the-beginners-guide-to-bitcoin-part-13-the-lightning-network-with-jack-mallers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKmIaHsV53A |
My step by step experience
- After downloading the app, the first thing Strike does is ask for your email address and send you a confirmation code to confirm.
- Once your email is confirmed, you choose a username (which can be changed later and act as your personal URL at strike.me/username), first name, last name and your phone number. Then they txt you a code to confirm your phone number as well.
- Once we confirmed our phone number, we were in! Our account was instantly "Approved". Not sure if that's the experience for everyone who goes through this signup process though... We were using a VPN and didn't have any trouble, so that's a good sign.
- From the main screen there's only a few things you can do: view your profile, view your transaction history, pay, request and deposit. The app shows a popup which says "Tap here to deposit" so we did that next.
- You're given two options 1) Bank transfer (Free) and 2) Debit Card (3.9% fee) and we tried the Debit Card first.
- We were told that "to add a debit card, we need some more information from you". The proceeded to collect our date of birth, address on our ID, social security number and pictures of the front and back of our ID.
- After submitting my information we were told that our verification was pending and it can take up to a full day! However, 30 seconds later there was a popup stating that our account was verified - that was fast!
- We tried adding our crypto.com debit card first which was unfortunately denied. We also tried our privacy.com debit card which was denied also. These special types of debit cards don't always work (for example they don't work with Venmo either). Unfortunately these are the only debit cards we had available so we decided to connect our bank account instead.
- Connecting our bank account was fairly simple. Strike uses Plaid to connect. You simply log into your bank, select the account you want to pull from, and bingo! You're connected.
- Next we went to strike.me/jack to send Jack Mallers (the founder of Strike) a $1 tip. We punched in the amount and scanned the QR code to find out that, "You don't have enough balance to pay this invoice.". Apparently we had to deposit money into the app before we could pay? That's less than ideal...
- So we went back, deposited $1 into the app, refreshed the invoice, scanned the QR code and boom! Payment successful!
- We received an email notification about our payment and we could see the payment in our transaction history within the app.