Bull Bitcoin vs Strike

Beyond the Features

Francis Pouliot and Jack Mallers diagnose the same disease. Both describe fiat money as a mechanism that steals human time and energy. Both have held these positions for years, not months — Pouliot since founding Bull Bitcoin in 2013, Mallers since building on Lightning as a young developer. If you're choosing between these two services, you're already in better hands than most of the industry offers.

Where they diverge is in what they're building between the diagnosis and the cure.

Pouliot has stated that Bull Bitcoin's goal is to "obsolete ourselves" — that the exchange business only exists because fiat still does, and when fiat collapses, Bull Bitcoin's core product should no longer be needed. This isn't just rhetoric. The product architecture reflects it. When you buy Bitcoin through Bull Bitcoin, it goes directly to your own wallet. There is no Bull Bitcoin balance. No account where coins sit. No custodial relationship at all. The company touches your money for the duration of the transaction, then steps away. Pouliot has described this as selling "UTXOs, not paper Bitcoin" — meaning every purchase is an actual on-chain transfer of real Bitcoin to keys you control.

Mallers is building something different: a "Bitcoin bank" designed to last a century. Strike holds your Bitcoin so it can offer financial services around it — lending against your stack, bill pay funded by your balance, direct deposit converted to Bitcoin. Mallers has called this the "hodler's dream," arguing that Bitcoin-backed loans let you access your wealth without selling and triggering a taxable event. He explicitly addresses the concern that engaging with fiat financial instruments gives energy to the old system — a position associated with Jeff Booth — and disagrees. "I don't think borrowing against your assets is giving energy to the old system," Mallers has stated. "I actually think the opposite."

That disagreement maps directly onto how each company handles your Bitcoin. Bull Bitcoin's non-custodial model eliminates entire categories of risk by design: there are no user funds to be fractionally reserved, no honeypot to attract hackers, no collateral to be rehypothecated. Strike promises no rehypothecation of lending collateral — but the promise requires trust in the institution. The architectural difference matters. One company can't mishandle your funds because it never holds them. The other asks you to trust that it won't.
The same pattern holds for privacy. Bull Bitcoin's product decisions — data deletion timelines, manual KYC options, in-house infrastructure built to avoid third-party data sharing — reflect a deliberate effort to minimize the surveillance footprint of using a regulated exchange. Strike complies with KYC requirements (Mallers has called this "very unfortunate"), but we found no public information about its data retention or minimization practices beyond standard compliance.

The funding models reinforce the divergence. Bull Bitcoin is entirely bootstrapped — no venture capital, no debt, no external shareholders. Pouliot has said the company answers only to its users and employees. Strike has taken venture capital (Anthony Pompliano was an early investor), and Mallers has launched a separate company, 21, co-founded with Tether and backed by SoftBank, designed to bring Bitcoin to Wall Street capital markets via a public listing. These aren't moral judgments — institutional capital can accelerate adoption. But they create different incentive structures. A bootstrapped company with no exit strategy can refuse to compromise indefinitely. A company with institutional backers and a public-markets vehicle faces pressures that compound over time.

Both companies exist because fiat still does — Pouliot admits this openly. But Bull Bitcoin's architecture points users toward sovereignty and then steps aside. Strike's model, by design, works better the longer you stay.