2021 was the year Lastbit put out the World’s first Lightning powered MasterCard. This meant that for the first time in the history of money, you can custody your own Bitcoin wherever you please and make an instant transaction to have spendable Euros on your Lastbit MasterCard.
Let that settle in.
Yes, there are tens of “crypto” debit cards out there, but NONE gave you the flexibility to custody your “crypto”.
Why? “Blockchain technology” is inherently slow, settling transactions takes time and when dealing with fiat in parallel, exchange rates change way too fast to wait an hour for 4 confirmations on-chain.
Enter Lightning: Run your own node, keep your Bitcoin at home on your node (controlled via Spark or Umbrel? Or even Breez, Muun or BlueWallet) and when you’re out, make an instant off-chain Bitcoin payment and voila, you have Euros, immediately on a widely accepted payment instrument.
Lastbit Lite and Lastbit Cards
Now, let’s take that a step further. Great, you can move funds as an individual between your wallet and a MasterCard, issued by some bank. Can’t banks and other Financial Institutions (FI) use this directly to settle transactions with each other?
Think simple: Revolut, Monzo, Monese, N26, Bunq etc. all ride the wave of neo-banking in Europe. But each of them bank with a different FI in the backend and settling transactions between different FI’s is still a slow and painful process.
We believe the answer is a resounding yes and this is why we built Lastbit Lite, a Lightning powered banking application that exposes instant Bitcoin payments for those who want it and just faster Euro transactions for those that don’t.
Thus, we ended up engineering two obscurely computational heavy applications with clean user interfaces, each powered by a different FI, proving clearly that you didn’t need to invent a new coin, token or some random protocol for faster and cheaper inter-FI settlements. Agreed, the KYC was horrendous and beyond tolerable for a while (unfortunately this was entirely out of our control and is simply subject to the AML regulations of the local country where our FI partner was based out of) but we’ve fixed this now with Striga for Consumers below.
In essence, summing up, this meant that Euros could move from Lastbit Lite to Lastbit Cards, each of which were backed by two entirely different FIs, instantly and for low fees, over Lightning, removing at least 5 different intermediaries and settlement houses.
Watch this, Bernardo pays a bill in Miami using Euros on his Lastbit Lite account, and both the FI and recipient were happy with this transaction, in two different countries.
Just today, we finally enabled Apple Pay & Google Pay support for Lastbit Cards. Yeah, this sounds simple, adding your card to an apple/google wallet, but the sheer monopoly and sequence of approvals/pricing and events involved under the hood in getting your virtual card into your tokenized Apple/Google wallet deserves another blog post on its own. A massive part of this industry is covered in so much red tape and we’re building Striga, to effectively strip away as much of it as possible. Read below to learn more about what that means.
Journey to Striga
Treading off topic for a bit, at the end of this year, we’re now backed by some 30 investors that believe in us to bring Striga to life, not the least of whom is YCombinator, the veteran Silicon Valley investor behind Airbnb, Dropbox, Coinbase, Gitlab, Reddit and hundreds of other companies that we look up to, as founders. We’re pumped about sharing our experience as founders going through YC and comparing it to some of the other incubators in the world.
If you know, you know.
There’s a lot we learned, and a lot to learn, an unfathomable amount, as young out-of-college founders, already with enough stories to write a book someday. All this led us to, finally assembling in our very own office in person in Europe after building Lastbit together entirely remotely from 3 absurdly different time zones during the COVID pandemic, for almost 20 months! Hard work pays off, it really does and it’s brilliant when you can physically see the fruit of it. The Lastbit story is still just beginning, a long way to go, starting with materializing Striga.
Striga
Today, we’re thrilled to bring Striga to life, under our real .com domain. This is a name and brand we’ve grown to love and reflects the maturity of our small company over the 4 odd years I/we have been doing this now. As much as we love Lastbit, shelling out millions for the lastbit.com domain didn’t seem sensible to us. Although the company will remain Lastbit, our line of products will all fall under striga.com as we transition out of the lastbit.io beta and TestFlight applications.
Striga, in itself, to summarize, will be largely broken into these pieces –
TLDR: Striga is a platform exposing a single API for untethered access to Bitcoin, Lightning, Cards, IBANs and more, for FinTech companies
Here’s a deeper dive on what businesses can do with Striga Core
Striga Core, or simply Striga, represents the base layer of all that we’ve built, the same platform that Lastbit Lite and Lastbit Cards itself is built on. We didn’t realize how much demand there was for a better Banking as a Service platform bundled together with Crypto. These are two entirely different worlds, with different asset classes, different service providers, different regulations, different laws and an entirely different technology basis. The backend that powered Lastbit was effectively a single API tying all of this in together and turns out there’s hundreds of fledgling companies with brilliant ideas and products that are underbanked and underserved because of the aforementioned red tape.
As a company, we’re really doubling down on solving this problem as we strongly see ourselves being a perfect fit to strike at the heart of the financial services industry built on legacy tech. At our core, we’ve been an infrastructure company since day one even though we did not fully reflect this in our messaging, adapting to customer demand as time passed.
Striga is a single platform with a single set of APIs that gives you untethered access to Bitcoin, Lightning account creation, management and tying it to mainstream European payment instruments – IBANs and Cards, in whatever direction you can imagine, for whatever entity you can imagine. This is of course version zero. Version one is already planned for 2022 and is an absolute, cross-border monster.
Read the bit about faster, cheaper inter-FI payments above? Now, imagine this same platform across continents. Build a Bitcoin IBAN program in Europe, flip a switch and you can now onboard Americans and Mexicans, to interact with multiple currencies and payment instruments, without ever having to open a new company or jump through technological/compliance hoops on either side. Conquering payment corridors that we intimately understand is what we strive for, starting with the UK and the EEA. Get in touch with us if you want early access to build on Striga.
Striga for Consumers (SfC)
TLDR: SfC is a Bitcoin & Lightning super-app, built on Striga, featuring Cards, IBANs and full on-chain/Lightning interoperability, with rewards and earning.
This is our interpretation of a single super-app that is entirely, 100% composed of customer feedback driven development. One of the absolute biggest learning things that YCombinator preaches about “building something people want”, is what we exactly took from the experience and implemented this year, in talking to customers and really, really listening to what worked and what didn’t. Some million euros, a few thousand support tickets and sleepless nights later, Striga for Consumers (SfC) came to be. And guess what? SfC is also built entirely on the Striga platform.
We’ll eventually open source this to give you an idea of what/how you can build on Striga in a stupidly simple way. Stay tuned for what’s coming with SfC here! Not to worry if you are a Lastbit Cards or a Lastbit Lite user, all your accounts will be cleanly migrated over.
Cheers and a happy new year, from our Winter office. We’re also hiring, drop us a line if this tickles your fancy.
