Lightspark Acquires Striga: A Leap Forward for Open, Compliant Payments on Bitcoin

Partnership Will Offer End-to-End Payments Experience for Fiat and Crypto Across European Member States and Sets Stage for MiCA and EMI Licenses

LOS ANGELES and TALLINN, Estonia, Oct. 14, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Lightspark shared that they have acquired Striga. Striga is the pioneering embedded finance and digital asset infrastructure platform with a robust regulatory footprint in Europe, operating through its VASP license across 30 countries in the European Economic Area (EEA). Striga’s deep regulatory expertise, licensing framework, and financial services stack, including direct integrations with fiat providers, card networks, and banks, will accelerate Lightspark’s ability to bring compliant, borderless money movement to millions of users and businesses worldwide.

Lightspark will work closely with Striga to bring incremental capabilities and offerings to customers, while also strengthening its regulatory positioning in Europe by applying for both e-money and MiCA licenses. Lightspark will then be able to offer a complete end-to-end experience to its customers, both for fiat and crypto across European member states.

Why Striga?

Striga was built from the ground up to solve a problem that every fintech or crypto builder knows: launching a compliant financial product is hard. Really hard.

From card issuing and Virtual IBAN creation to crypto custody and fiat ramps, Striga has built a modern payments stack that abstracts away the complexity of regulation, licensing, compliance, and integration with banks, brokers, and card schemes. Striga has led digital asset-enabled payments in Europe—enabling builders to launch sophisticated financial products in weeks, not years.

They didn’t just build the stack. They also earned the VASP license to operate in the EU. Striga was the first company approved under Estonia’s new, MiCA-style regulatory system. In a post-2022 world where regulators are cracking down, Striga has emerged as a rare success story: compliant, cash flow-positive, and trusted by over 50 companies building regulated finance apps, wallets, and card programs across the EEA.

What This Means for Lightspark

Lightspark is building open payments for the Internet, powered by Bitcoin. To unlock that, Lightspark needs to make payments as open, easy, compliant, and seamless as sending a message online, especially for financial institutions and regulated businesses. With Striga, Lightspark gains:

• A robust regulatory footprint in Europe, including a VASP license and direct integrations with card networks and banks. As part of this strategic acquisition, Striga will further strengthen its regulatory position in the EU by applying for both e-money and MiCA licenses. This will allow Lightspark to support the entire payment experience for both fiat and crypto across European countries.
• An end-to-end fintech infrastructure platform – enabling Virtual IBAN issuance, card issuing, crypto-fiat ramps, and custody, all through APIs.
• A proven team and platform – with product-market fit, with well over $200M in processed volume, and deep expertise in compliance and risk management. Jointly, Lightspark and Striga are working towards being among the first regulated e-Money institutions and Crypto Asset Service Providers in Estonia and Europe.
• A faster path to compliant go-to-market – helping partners in Europe and beyond embed Bitcoin-native payments into existing financial workflows.

Compliant Bitcoin-Powered Payments

Bringing Bitcoin into everyday finance isn’t just about technology—it’s about trust, compliance, and real-world interoperability. Striga’s infrastructure bridges the gap between crypto innovation and traditional financial institutions by doing the heavy lifting: onboarding users, managing compliance, issuing cards, and connecting to fiat rails. This, paired with Lightspark’s protocol-level capabilities, such as Spark, provides a powerful combination: regulated endpoints that can connect to open, global money movement.

Imagine a neobank in France issuing a debit card backed by Bitcoin. A crypto wallet in Spain offering instant Bitcoin payments with IBAN pay-ins. A cross-border payments app in Portugal onboards users and seamlessly converts euros to sats. All in a fully compliant way. That’s the future Lightspark is building—where Bitcoin isn't just an asset, but a foundation for global, open, regulated payments.

What’s Next

Lightspark’s one unified platform will deliver a fully compliant, always-on, Internet-scale payments experience for partners and their users. Of course, Striga will continue to serve existing customers with the same high level of service and support, while becoming an integral part of Lightspark’s infrastructure stack.

Lightspark is thrilled to welcome the entire Striga team, including CEO Prashanth Balasubramanian and key leaders across compliance, risk, engineering, and growth. They’ve built something exceptional—and together, Lightspark and Striga are going to take it even further.

About Lightspark

The Internet has open protocols for everything, except money. Lightspark is changing that. We're building modern, always-on payment solutions powered by Bitcoin: the only open, neutral network for moving value. With enterprise tools like Connect, UMA, and Spark, businesses can send and receive money instantly, securely, and at a fraction of the cost, anytime, anywhere. Follow on X @lightspark

About Striga

Striga has built the tools that innovators need to build compliant payment applications covering Bitcoin, stablecoins, and fiat across 30 countries in the EEA, without doing any of the heavy lifting. Backed by YCombinator, UC Berkeley, Stillmark, Fulgur Ventures, and many other notable names, Striga has enabled European businesses to move more than 2000 Bitcoin in less than 28 months, at a tiny fraction of the time and cost it takes to build an EU-compliant payment product.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/d009a4bf-3390-4fe8-ba12-6599508bc7aa.

Lightspark press@lightspark.com