The dropout who dared: How Strike is rewiring global money

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Rizzo, the Bitcoin Historian here, back this week with the story of one of the younger Bitcoin legends — I’m talking about the one, the only Jack Mallers.

If you’ve seen Jack in any of the dozens of interviews he’s given from his large, empty closet, you know he’s an eloquent defender of Bitcoin. You may not know his long road to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Before his work on Strike, he had a few Bitcoin startup ideas that didn’t quite work. Yet all that hard work paid off when he helped an entire nation onboard to a Bitcoin standard.

Bitcoin Legends: Jack Mallers

Not many can say their parents got them involved in Bitcoin, but Jack can.

His father, William Mallers Jr., was a former Chicago Board of Trade chair who discovered bitcoin when it was under $100. He hosted a series of meet-ups in the Windy City, including one fateful afternoon when Andreas M. Antonopoulos showed up. According to Jack, the first time he truly understood Bitcoin was when the GOAT of all Bitcoin educators talked to him about the power of the tech.

One of my favorite Mallers moments was on Christmas Day 2013, when Jack and his siblings received gift cards purchased with bitcoin. The price was $1,200 back then, but the move was priceless and timeless.

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It’s nearly cliché by now, but Jack didn’t dive into Bitcoin right away.

He enrolled in St. John’s University in New York but soon dropped out. Instead, he returned to Chicago to attend a coding camp when he realized he was more interested in technology than academics.

At 18, and after coding, he signed up for a school for entrepreneurs and launched his first app: ChessExplained. It was a unique way for coaches to teach the sport (or is it a discipline?), and help with students trying to advance their skills.

Here’s a demo from nine years ago:

It didn’t work out, but by 2016, Jack was ready to go all in on Bitcoin.

His big idea? Using “the most revolutionary technology we’ve seen since the internet” to disrupt the gambling industry with an app called Zero House Bets. Jack’s biggest frustration came from the hefty commissions that websites like Bet Online charged.

He saw Bitcoin as the fix — It was cheaper, faster, and didn’t need a middleman to move money.

Lightning strikes

Zero House Bets didn’t take off, either. So, Jack built his first Lightning app, Zap, from his bedroom.

Here’s the early website, launched when BTC was around $1,000.

Jack went all-in on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. One of his earliest tweets is a manifesto to why the network would never die. “Bitcoin will succeed,” he wrote, “because I won’t let it die. The developers, unbanked, hodlers, and millennials, won’t let it die.”

He tweeted: “What’s really going parabolic is the number of people willing to fight for Bitcoin and all it stands for. Price has no choice but to follow.”

In 2018, when some still doubted Lightning’s viability, Jack made one of the world’s first Lightning purchases.

The Lightning Network wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for people like Jack. For example, here’s a map of the protocol’s first 100 nodes. The one encircled is his company, Zap.

But Jack wasn’t playing around — he saw Zap becoming the app to take on giants like Venmo and Visa. Check out this 2019 sketch for what would become his baby, and one of the biggest companies in Bitcoin: Strike.

By 2019, Jack had raised $3 million for Strike.

What started in his mom’s basement had grown into a company with developers and users. Strike’s user base soon exploded, attracting endorsements from Bitcoin fans and celebrities.

In 2020, NFL star Russell Okung announced he would use Strike to become the first NFL player to get paid in BTC.

El Salvador

Then came one of the most important speeches in Bitcoin history.

The stage: Miami. The year: 2021. Jack jumps on, sporting a blue soccer team jersey for El Salvador. I remember seeing Jack and Pomp in a corner before the speech. They seemed to be smiling at something, and reviewing slides.

There was a lot of hype, but no one saw this announcement coming.

El Salvador was not only investing in BTC, but making it legal tender. It became the first country in the world to legalize Satoshi’s creation, thanks in part to Jack’s influence on the ground.

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