Strike Launch In Argentina With USDT, But Without Bitcoin Support As Of Now
Strike, a bitcoin-based wallet and exchange service, has officially launched in Argentina, bringing USDT integration to users in the country. But as of now, the wallet doesn’t support BTC in the country.
Jack Mallers, CEO of Strike, explained that his objective for bringing the app to the country has to do with providing a platform for Argentinians to hold a stable value in cash. This value will be held in the form of USDT, with no option for storing bitcoin, at least at launch.
Mallers, who explained that due to the financial woes the citizens of the country are experiencing, there is a migration to foreign currencies such as the dollar.
He tweeted:
“There is now unprecedented demand for an open monetary system that lives within a distributed network, has a known monetary policy, a fixed supply, and is resistant to censorship.”
With Strike, the Argentinian people can now hold a stable cash balance that can be spent both instantly and with no fees.
Cheap, instant, cash final, global payments of any size, for anyone, to anywhere. Even over @Twitter.
Strike, known for its Bitcoin and Lightning Network capabilities, launched in Argentina with USDT as its backbone. This was considered strange by some local media outlets, considering that Mallers has publicly been a big supporter of the Bitcoin ecosystem, and that Strike has implemented these services in other locations already, including El Salvador.
The current version of the application for Argentina uses USDT, the popular stablecoin issued by Tether, as a backbone to store value for users. USDT has a market cap of more than $78 billion dollars, being the most valuable stablecoin project in the whole cryptocurrency market. The USDT version that Strike uses is an ERC20 token, which uses the Ethereum blockchain.
But, as Strike is a custodial wallet, users won’t have to deal with the high fees that are bugging some Ethereum users currently, as transactions using Strike are free of charge. In its terms of service the wallet explains that Bittrex is used for the custody of the assets, and that the company is not responsible for the custody of the cryptocurrency in its wallet.
Yet there is a way to receive Bitcoin via Strike in Argentina. Mallers showed that users could link Strike to their Twitter accounts and receive tips through the new feature enabled by the social media platform. However, the service appears to have failed for several users in different instances, such as when verifying their identity or when the username contains non-alphanumeric characters such as hyphens or underscores.
