Money Was Always in the Air

Jack Mallers grew up in a house where finance wasn't a career choice — it was the family language. His grandfather, William Mallers Sr., was chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade. His father, William Mallers Jr., was a futures trader who co-founded a brokerage firm. Three generations of Mallers men had lived and breathed markets, and Jack was next in line.

But Jack was also a kid who wanted to build things. After a year at St. John's University in New York, he dropped out and enrolled in a coding bootcamp in Chicago. He started writing apps — wheelchair-accessible transportation, fitness trainers, chess. He was learning how to make software solve real problems.

In 2013, his father bought Bitcoin. The price was under $100. He gave Jack and his siblings gift cards purchased with it that Christmas — a gesture that would turn out to be one of the more consequential presents in Bitcoin history. Jack didn't dive in immediately. But the seed was planted.

The Basement, the Vision, and the Lightning Network

By 2016, Jack was fully down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. He had a big idea — use Bitcoin to disrupt the online gambling industry by eliminating the massive commissions that betting sites charged. The app was called Zero House Bets. It didn't take off.

But building it taught him something more valuable than the gambling market could have offered. He had discovered the Lightning Network — a layer built on top of Bitcoin that enabled transactions to happen instantly and essentially for free, without waiting for the main blockchain to confirm them. Most of the Bitcoin world was still treating Bitcoin as digital gold, something to hold. Jack saw something else: a payment network that could outcompete Visa, Western Union, and every bank wire in existence.

In 2017, from his bedroom, he launched Zap — one of the first Lightning Network wallets, built so that regular people could actually use it. The Lightning Network at the time was a technical curiosity. Zap tried to make it a product.

Strike: What if Every Bank Account Could Speak Bitcoin?

Zap worked, but Jack kept bumping into the same friction point: to use Lightning, you had to already own Bitcoin, manage a wallet, understand seed phrases, and deal with the tax implications of spending crypto. For most people, that was too many steps. The technology was brilliant. The user experience was broken.

In 2020, he relaunched under a new name: Strike. The insight behind Strike was deceptively simple. What if someone could pay in dollars, and the payment would travel over the Lightning Network using Bitcoin as the invisible bridge — arriving at the other end as dollars, or any other currency, instantly and for free? The sender never needed to own Bitcoin. The recipient never needed to own Bitcoin. Bitcoin was the rail, not the cargo.

"What if everyone's bank account could speak Bitcoin?" he asked.

Strike launched into a world that wasn't quite ready. Then the world caught up fast. By the end of 2020, Strike had raised $3 million and was attracting attention. NFL star Russell Okung announced he would use Strike to become the first NFL player to receive his salary in Bitcoin. The app was being downloaded in places where traditional banking was expensive or unavailable. Something was working.

Miami, 2021: The Speech That Changed a Country

In June 2021, Jack Mallers walked onto the stage at the Bitcoin Conference in Miami wearing a blue El Salvador soccer jersey. He was 27 years old.

What came next was one of the most dramatic moments in Bitcoin's history. Jack had spent months quietly working with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, traveling to El Salvador, meeting with government officials, learning about the country's economy — where 70% of the population was unbanked and remittances sent home by Salvadorans working abroad made up nearly a quarter of GDP. Western Union and other services were taking enormous fees on those remittances. Families were losing real money every time a relative sent money home.

Strike had built a solution. Send money from the US to El Salvador in seconds, using Lightning, for almost no fee. No wire transfer. No three-day wait. No 8% commission to a middleman.

On that Miami stage, with tears running down his face, Jack announced that El Salvador had passed the Bitcoin Law — making it the first sovereign nation in history to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. The crowd erupted. Simultaneously, President Bukele made the announcement in San Salvador.

The result was messy, as history tends to be. The Salvadoran government built its own state-run wallet, Chivo, rather than using Strike exclusively. Adoption among ordinary Salvadorans was slower than hoped. Critics pointed to problems. But the historic fact stood: a sovereign nation had encoded Bitcoin as legal tender, and a 27-year-old from Chicago had been in the room where it happened.

What Jack Mallers Believes (and Why It Matters to Merchants)

Jack Mallers is not a subtle thinker. He is loud, passionate, sometimes polarizing. He has been criticized for his maximalism — his willingness to call other cryptocurrencies worthless while championing Bitcoin alone. He has been celebrated for the same reason. He doesn't hedge.

His core argument, stated simply: the existing financial system is built on trust in institutions that have repeatedly broken that trust. Inflation erodes savings. Fees extract wealth from the people who can least afford it. The unbanked are unbanked not because they're irresponsible, but because the system wasn't designed for them.

Bitcoin, in his telling, is not primarily a speculative asset. It is moral infrastructure — a payment network that cannot be censored, inflated, or confiscated. He has said this in congressional hearings, on Bloomberg, on podcasts, and to anyone who would listen for the better part of a decade.

For small business owners, his argument lands somewhere specific: the 2.6% you pay to accept a credit card is not a law of physics. It is a fee extracted by intermediaries who add no value to the transaction itself. Bitcoin removes them.

Timeline

The Merchant Connection

Jack Mallers has spent his career trying to solve the same problem from different angles: how do you make Bitcoin work for people who just need to move money, pay for things, and get paid — without turning them into crypto experts first?

That question is exactly what OrangeTill is built on. The merchant shouldn't need to understand the Lightning Network or manage private keys or explain Bitcoin to every customer. They should just be able to say yes when someone asks "do you take crypto?" — and have the rest handled.

Jack would probably agree with that framing. He has said repeatedly that the point of Strike is to make Bitcoin's rails invisible — so invisible that users don't even know they're using them. The technology disappears. The benefit remains.

For small business owners thinking about accepting Bitcoin: Jack Mallers is the reason the infrastructure works well enough for you to do it. He spent years building the plumbing. OrangeTill is one of the faucets.