One of the more durable claims in Bitcoin-rollout journalism is that Strike — the Lightning-Network fintech founded by Jack Mallers — provided the underlying technology for El Salvador's Chivo Wallet during the country's 2021 Bitcoin legal-tender adoption. The claim appears in industry publications, in vendor comparison sites (this one previously included it), and in social-media commentary about El Salvador's Bitcoin policy.
The claim is false. The actual underlying technology provider for Chivo Wallet is AlphaPoint, a US-based digital-asset infrastructure firm. The confusion arose because Strike was visibly active in El Salvador around the legal-tender announcement, Mallers gave high-profile speeches at the Bitcoin 2021 conference about the rollout, and Strike's Lightning rails were a topic of public discussion at the time. None of this constituted a commercial relationship with the El Salvadoran government.
"There is no commercial agreement between Strike and the government of El Salvador." — Jack Mallers, on the record, multiple occasions
What actually powers Chivo
Chivo Wallet is built on AlphaPoint's white-label digital-asset infrastructure. AlphaPoint provides front-end and back-end systems for state-issued and commercial digital-asset products globally; the El Salvadoran government's Chivo deployment is one of their case studies. The Lightning-Network functionality in Chivo uses Lightning rails but is not built on Strike's specific implementation.
Strike operates its own Lightning-native fiat-to-Bitcoin product across the US, EU, UK, parts of LATAM, and parts of Africa. That product is real, well-engineered, and Lightning-leading — but it is a separate product offering from Chivo, with no commercial linkage to the El Salvadoran state.
Why this correction matters
Three reasons.
It misattributes credit. AlphaPoint built the system that handled the population-scale rollout; that's a meaningful technical accomplishment that should be correctly attributed. State-scale digital- asset infrastructure is rare; misattribution distorts the industry landscape for anyone making vendor decisions.
It misframes Strike. Strike has its own commercial product with real merits — most notably Lightning-Network-native fiat-to-Bitcoin purchase at low spread, the cross-border remittance corridors it operates, and the B2B Strike API that powers Lightning integration in third-party apps. Pretending it powers Chivo dilutes those actual achievements.
It complicates the El Salvador analysis. Chivo Wallet, as of December 2024, is being sold or wound down per the IMF agreement that El Salvador signed to access its $1.4B financing facility. The Chivo experiment's outcome — adoption metrics, technical performance, political reception — is a meaningful policy data point. Attributing it to the wrong technology vendor obscures what the experiment actually showed.
What Strike actually does, accurately
Strike (Chicago, founded 2020) operates a Lightning-Network-native fiat- to-Bitcoin product. Users in supported markets (US, EU, UK, parts of LATAM, parts of Africa) can buy BTC with USD, EUR, or USDT at a published 0.15% DCA spread (or up to ~0.65% for one-time purchases, tiered by volume). Lightning-Network sends are instant and sub-cent. The Strike API is integrated into Cash App for cross-border BTC sends and into a number of third-party Lightning-native apps.
Strike is FinCEN-MSB-registered, holds Money Transmitter Licences in 35+ US states, and operates in the EU under a Lithuanian VASP licence. See the Strike entry for the full review.
Sources and further reading
- AlphaPoint — Chivo Bitcoin Wallet case study
- Jack Mallers, public statements (Bitcoin 2021 conference; multiple X / Twitter posts; podcast interviews) — explicitly stating no commercial Strike-Chivo agreement
- Strike entry — corrected coverage
- Corrections policy
- Fact-checking policy — how we verify regulatory + commercial claims