Strike recently announced a series of partnerships geared towards mainstreaming Bitcoin payments. The biggest of these partnerships is the partnership with Shopify. The partnership allows Shopify merchants to receive Bitcoin payments in fiat currencies, such as the CAD or USD. This new partnership will enable Shopify stores to avoid the high transaction fees, unnecessarily long waiting period for payment settlement and unreasonable chargebacks. With the new partnerships, merchants can expect to receive payments almost instantly, as opposed to the 2-week waiting period for most card payment providers.
About the Partnership
Strike is a digital payments platform built around Bitcoin's Lightning Network. This is a parallel network that runs as a second layer built on top of Bitcoin blockchain. This has a number of benefits. For starters, transaction fees are low while transactions are lightning-fast. To access the service, customers must have a Lightning Network-compatible wallet, such as CashApp, which has over 70 million users. Payments can be received as either Bitcoins or the fiat currency equivalent, such as USD or CAD.
Strike's Other Partnerships
Before partnering with Shopify, Strike had made a number of other partnerships with Blackhawk and NCR. The former is a payments firm while NCR is the world's largest point of sale (POS) supplier. These partnerships allow eligible Shopify merchants to accept Bitcoin payments. In addition to bitcoin payments, the partnership will enable Lightning Network to offer other assets, such as fiat currencies, bitcoins and stablecoins among others
How the Shopify Partnerships Benefit Merchants
This partnership has many benefits for merchants. For starters, they can continue using existing payment solutions, such as Visa and MasterCard among other types of card payments. Secondly, merchants can enjoy improved cashflow because their cash will not be tied up for up to 15 days, which is the waiting period put in place by major card payment providers. Thirdly, both merchants and customers can benefit greatly from the low processing fees. Lastly, payments are converted from bitcoin to fiat currencies, such as CAD and USD. Having an additional payment getaway on a Shopify store can help attract additional customers. Since the Strike-Shopify partnership facilitates both local and international transactions, many businesses will record increased sales from international customers. This is good news for any business that wants to spread its wings across borders. The best thing about it is that payments will not be received in foreign currencies, but bitcoin or USD, or any other preferred currency.