jack mallers

After rolling out its Strike app to public beta and partnering with Visa on a debit card, Lightning wallet provider Zap has announced a $3.5 million seed round.

Strike is an application that allows you to transact with Lightning payments with just a debit card or bank account. But, here’s the secret sauce: instead of having to buy bitcoin to load up your Lightning channels, users on Strike never touch BTC.

Bitcoin’s third epoch was largely defined by the growth of the Lightning Network. We asked the second layer protocol’s leaders what that growth will look like following the third Halving.

Zap’s Olympus would have let users buy bitcoin with fiat on the Lightning Network. A new feature called Strike changes how this will be done.

Zap wallet will soon let you buy bitcoin in the app and deposit the sats directly into your Lightning wallet after each purchase.

Just as smart contracts brought DApps to Ethereum’s network, the Lightning Network is primed to bring a host of Lightning apps to Bitcoin.