How El Salvador Made Bitcoin Grow Faster Than the Internet | Jack Mallers

Jack Mallers and Mike Peterson share two unforgettable stories from Bitcoin’s early days in El Salvador. 

Strike once tested a small ten-cent reward for new users, and the strong response showed how even tiny incentives could spark Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador. They also tell how local kids used Strike and Bitrefill to buy Free Fire game credits online for the first time. Since they didn’t have credit cards, Bitcoin let them make legit online purchases, surprising a shop owner who thought the system had been hacked. 

Watch the FULL EPISODE here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4xoRv_YWuY 

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Transcript

Mike Peterson: It's crucial because when people you do all this work to onboard them, and then when they have these fee spikes and they don't understand even why, and then you try to explain them, it's crucial that there are tools like Strike there to to kind of go around that.

Jack Mallers: So yeah, that's been the goal is just get out. And I mean, Bitcoin is global money, right? And so it's a natural advantage that we have as a financial company is that we can launch our products in another market. And we have a target audience. It's also insane the network effects and the economies of scale that come with being a Bitcoin company.

You know, Uber could have maybe convinced everyone in America to not use cabs and use some random person's car, but then replicating that in another market is a lot of marketing to just convince people, "Hey, don't get in the taxi, get in this random dude's car". And we don't have that challenge either. You know, because Bitcoin is a marketing beast on its own and it carries its own brand, and that we can launch in a market and get users immediately.

So it's been fun. It's been hard. I mean, there's always been rules. So, a lot of the U.S. and, you know, Phoenix leaving America, there's always been rules. They were never really enforced. The post-FTX world is obvious. And so it's been difficult because we've always wanted to do things the right way for the mere reason that I want this company to exist forever.

I want to be CEO forever. I want to pass it to my kids or whoever, right? And so we had to follow the rules. So that's just taken time and energy, but we're getting there.

Mike Peterson: When you guys came here and you were doing the incentive of.

Jack Mallers: Five, ten, whatever it was.

Mike Peterson: $5 or $10. And then I think, and I remember telling you guys, "Oh, that might be a little high". And you're like, "Nah, this." And you got, I think, like 30 times as many people as you thought.

Jack Mallers: You were going to get. Yeah, that, and that was the first time as a business we realized, like, a referral fee of $0.10 in a smaller emerging market versus a referral fee of $10 in America, New York City or whatever. It was so fascinating, too, because everyone was forced to figure out how to do on and off ramps at the time because the money on Strike was only as valuable as you can get physical cash.

And so there were people that were like manually, like manual Strike Western Union-type people are like, "Here, you can send me, I'll give you cash". And there are people making Strike markets. And so, yeah, I mean, learning experiences.

Mike Peterson: I remember I got a call from Bitrefill and they're like, "We think we're being hacked, but we don't know how because but these people are buying all of these products, these Free Fire gift certificates".

Jack Mallers: It's the best.

Mike Peterson: And it's got to be a hack. And I'm like, "No, that's all the kids in El Salvador that haven't been able to buy the cloak or the armor for their little video game, they now have access". They don't have credit cards, so they can never do it before. But now with Bitcoin, they can buy that. And yeah, he's like, "It's the most we've ever sold of any product anywhere in a day". And it's all come from El Salvador.

Jack Mallers: It was actually a lot of these learnings where we put Bitrefill in the Strike app now.

Mike Peterson: And it's not a.

Jack Mallers: Particularly popular in a lot of these markets because it has a natural off-ramp. That's a lot of the product.

Mike Peterson: Market, and it helps them. They don't have another option, like if they don't have a credit card, they've been like kept out, walled out of a lot of these things. Now they have access to it.

Jack Mallers: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. The gift card Bitrefill model is ingenious. Again, in hindsight, I didn't come up with it, unfortunately, but it's great. And it was through these learnings where we were able to watch users get capital in the door and then we're just like, really a ton of money going to Bitrefill Lightning.

Mike Peterson: Yeah.

Jack Mallers: We're like, "Wow, I should probably partner with these guys". Optimize user experience for this.