Moving to Striga — By Lastbit
TLDR: Lastbit is ending it’s beta, moving over to a full release application, under striga.com. If you are a beta user, move your funds out of Lastbit Lite and Cards before the end of February 2022 (Bank transfer, Bitcoin on-chain/Lightning or Card spend). Your Lastbit MasterCard however will continue to work (UPDATE: Our banking partners confirmed that your card will only work until the date the applications are alive until, i.e. March 2022!), you just won’t be able to add more funds to it. Your accounts will be moved over to the new applications with a new banking backend and new cards.
2021 was the year of the beta for Lastbit. We put out the world’s first ever instant Bitcoin powered payments device, coupled with a powerful companion application called Lastbit Lite that brought Lightning & DCA to even non-bitcoiners.
2022 is the year Lastbit finally grows out of its beta stage into a full fledged mainstream product. To that extent, we listened and learned constantly through the beta to understand what matters to our users and what didn’t. We commonly heard feedback such as the pain of having two separate applications, friction during onboarding, high spreads etc. and Striga fixes this.
So what comes next?
A more descriptive story about this exists here. The main takeaway here is that the company has been steadily growing towards solving a problem for a mainstream audience. In that journey we realized how difficult it is for newer companies or even established companies to blend the crypto and fiat worlds whether it is a neo-bank or a DeFi product or just a vanilla crypto card. The entire industry is shrouded in ambiguous regulations and NDAs packaged with red tape. Cutting through the red tape, we’re committed to building Bitcoin friendly infrastructure for businesses, start-ups and institutions that makes it transparent and easy to build applications without having to worry about compliance or gargantuan fee structures. The Striga platform is what the new application itself is built upon and we’re opening that infrastructure up for others to build on.
Effectively, we’ve gotten so good at handling the heavy lifting involved in connecting modern infrastructure to legacy issuing/banking infrastructure in a way where the entire thing is 100% compliant, that we are now opening this infrastructure up to you, so that you, the builder can mix and match IBANs, Cards, Lightning, Wallet issuing & Exchange capability, to power your business logic in a faster and more cost efficient than any alternative.
Among our first builders are some interesting use cases such as a Telegram based crypto-card application and an interest bearing DeFi card application.
If I am a Lastbit beta user, what do I need to do?
For Lastbit Lite users
- Cancel any standing DCA orders
- Send Bitcoin via on-chain or Lightning
- Withdraw EUR to your bank or Buy Bitcoin and send it out
For Lastbit Cards users
- Withdraw your cashback (if any)
- Send EUR out via Lightning from your card or use your MasterCard
- Your Pro Subscription (if active) will live on until it expires.
What happens to my funds on Lastbit Lite & Lastbit Cards?
- Nothing, they are all protected by regulated financial institutions. But since we are developing new infrastructure, moving your funds out to your own bank account or wallet is the fastest and safest way to move to the new application.
Will I get a new account on Striga with a new card?
- Yes! There will no longer exist two separate apps. Everything you know and love with Lastbit will be merged into a single application with a simple and intuitive feature set.
If you have any questions, please write to us on support[at]lastbit.io
Sincerely,
Thank you for being a beta tester. This move would not be possible without your feedback and interest.
