It has been documented that Jack Mallers (the CEO of Strike) has been posting tweets that are referencing Apple. People are speculating that Strike and Apple have struck a partnership to integrate with Apple Pay and possibly it's going to be announced at next week's bitcoin conference.
I'm inclined to believe that this is either true or pretty close to the truth. Frankly Strike would be the company that makes the most sense for Apple to choose to do this integration. Strike has already proven it can handle this type of work while helping with the El Salvador rollout. There isn't any company better suited. While Apple has the resources to do this "in house", I suspect that the higher ups in management are afraid that Apple might end up behind if it doesn't roll out something in the next few months.
Partnering with Strike on the other hand provides for a rapid rollout as well as world class technical support (who I have had the pleasure of interacting with on several occasions). It will instantly vault Apple to the lead in the phone wars in regards to crypto. Just yesterday news came out that there is going to be some kind of integration with Apple Pay and Metamask. Adding a solid BTC/lightning integration to this would create almost the perfect crypto platform on a mobile device. Far better than anything available right now.
Not only will it create a slick, integrated platform it will open up crypto to an IMMENSE number of people who currently think it's too difficult (it's not...but that is what they think). Roughly one billion people around the world have iPhones. That's an insane number of people!! You may or may not like Apple and their particular company philosophies .. but that number of users can not be ignored. The only smart phone that is ahead worldwide is Samsung. In the United States 65% of the smart phones are Apple. So, if done well, this is a huge advantage for Apple in the smartphone race.
And where would it go from there? In my opinion (and it's only an opinion .. not financial advice etc), if the announcement happens as I outlined the price of Bitcoin will shoot up significantly virtually immediately. It might break above 53k and head for new all time highs. If the price is near or at that 53k level (it's $47,000 at the time of writing) when an announcement is made the price might be near ATH within a few days or a week.
But, even more significant, those millions and millions of Apple iPhone users will now have instance, easy access to buying Bitcoin. And many of them will have never bought crypto. Over the coming months this may prove to be far more beneficial to the price of Bitcoin and crypto in general than immediate 5 or 10% jump in the price over the few days after such an announcement. The last year in the markets have been marked by the lack of volume in "retail" users. These are the average joes/janes out there buying Bitcoin and other crypto for investment. The volume for months has been extremely low. I think that the rollout of this service would provide a noticeable uptick in retail volume. I am anxiously looking forward to next week's announcements.
I will be discussing any new information about this on the Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency podcast which will be released Monday morning (US/Central time). It's available on any Podcasting 2.0 App or even the old skool lame podcasting apps.
Here's to the future.
McIntosh