If you think it would be impossible to find a global remittance company that can do lightning-fast money transfer transactions to the Philippines, think again.
Digital payments firm Strike has just expanded its international money transfer service that runs on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network to the Philippines. According to the company’s press release, the decision is in line with their desire to tap into the country’s US$12 billion remittance market — one of the world’s largest.
The press release further stated that the remittance service will run on the Lightning Network, a “layer 2” scaling solution that would enable cheaper and faster Bitcoin transactions. Funds sent via the service from abroad can now be received as local currency in the recipient’s bank or mobile money account.
Strike’s remittance service, “Send Globally,” will now be available in the Philippines starting this month.
Lightning’s low-cost and near-instant payments now making waves globally
Strike has made waves through its work with EL Salvador to support bitcoin as a legal tender in that Central American country. Today, its goal is to upend the traditional multi-billion-dollar remittance industry, which it says is plagued by high fees and slow processing times.
The company plans to do this by leveraging Lightning’s low-cost and near-instant payments.
“When you think cross-border, you don’t think very fast, very cheap and very good experience,” Strike founder and CEO Jack Mallers said in a press statement. “We have been using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network under the hood to achieve some stuff that has never been possible before.”
Lightning analytics site, 1ML shows an increasingly vibrant network with over 16,000 nodes, more than 76,000 channels (connections between Lightning nodes) and a network capacity that’s close to 5,300 BTC (roughly US$122 million).
“Even a couple years ago, Lightning wasn’t as developed,” Mallers explained. “A network is only as strong as its participants. The growth of the network has economies of scale and network effects that we’ve never seen before.”
According to the press release, the Strike app converts dollars into bitcoin and sends a Lightning payment to a third-party partner in the recipient’s country. (Earlier this year, Strike has partnered with Pouch.ph, a Bitcoin payments firm in the Philippines). The partner converts that bitcoin into local fiat currency and forwards the money to the recipient’s bank or mobile money account.
Mallers says all of this takes place outside of the view of users, shielding them from the complexity of bitcoin payments and removing any potential tax implications that could result from the sale and disposition of bitcoin.
“There’s all sorts of tax consequences involved – if I wanted to remit money from here to the Philippines, I would have to tell the IRS about it. That’s ridiculous,” Maller said. “We use the properties of Lightning under the hood. So our users don’t even know we’re using it. They’re just sending dollars and receiving pesos.”
Send Globally was also launched in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana in December last year. “We have partners all over the world,” Mallers said, “because Lightning is this open payment network.”