Welcoming Davi Strazza as Lightspark's Chief Business Officer. Lightspark Group is thrilled to announce that Davi Strazza has joined Lightspark as its new Chief Business Officer. Davi brings a wealth of experience in building and scaling global payments businesses, with a proven track record of developing and implementing innovative payments solutions that unlock new growth opportunities. Throughout his career, most recently a decade at Adyen, he has been at the intersection of traditional financial infrastructure and emerging digital technologies. This perspective perfectly aligns with Lightspark's mission to build the future of open, instant, and global payments. At Lightspark, Davi will lead its sales, go-to-market strategy, partnerships, and commercial growth initiatives. He'll be instrumental in helping Lightspark Group scale adoption of its platform and tools, from Lightspark Grid to Spark, and in accelerating how businesses around the world connect to a faster, more open financial network. Its mission has always been to simplify and supercharge the movement of money globally. Davi's leadership, insight, and passion for building trusted, long-term relationships with partners will be key as Lightspark Group move into its next phase of growth. Please join Lightspark Group in welcoming Davi to the Lightspark team. Lightspark Group is incredibly excited about what's ahead, and even more energized about the impact Lightspark Group can make together.

Proof launches digital credential solution to power modern compliance for Digital Asset Services. Lightspark partners with Proof to develop digital ID and sanctions credentials for regulated payments. BOSTON-(BUSINESS WIRE)-Proof, the trusted platform for securing the digital economy, today announced digital credential solutions that enable digital asset wallets, service providers, and users to prove their identity and KYC characteristics in a privacy-protecting, repeatable, and secure way. The solution offers a modern approach to on-chain activities, streamlining user experiences and enhancing compliance for regulated service providers and their customers. While digital asset transfers happen in real-time, regulatory compliance has remained slow and cumbersome. Proof changes this with the first trusted digital credential that enables instant ID and characteristic (e.g., sanctions screening) verification for on-chain participants, bringing compliance up to speed. Trusted digital credentials issued by Proof will enable blockchain-based open payment and transaction networks to scale while regulated participants meet their regulatory obligations. "There is incredible innovation and potential in blockchain technology to transform finance, and digital credentials are a necessary component for these networks to support mainstream payments and other financial services," said Proof CEO and Founder Pat Kinsel. "Financial institutions won't fully embrace blockchain-based services until they can verify parties in a transaction and meet the same compliance standards they follow for traditional transactions. Proof's identity platform bridges that gap and enables mainstream consumers and financial institutions to embrace digital assets confidently." Digital Credentials for Digital Asset Services Proof is launching the industry's first entity-level certification solution for US sanctions screening. This credential enables instant verification by banks, payment service providers, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, hosted wallet services, and other financial institutions to verify the US sanctions status of counterparties and customers, allowing them to better integrate into the traditional banking and payments economy. Proof acts as a centralized certification authority, issuing cryptographically secure credentials that enable market participants to efficiently perform required diligence checks and compliance reviews as mandated by their regulatory obligations. Lightspark Leverages Proof Lightspark, the fastest global open payment network built on Bitcoin, is one of the first companies to join Proof's network, advancing its compliance capabilities and utilizing Proof's Certify product to verify and secure transactions. "Lightspark is building the future of global payments on Bitcoin - the world's most open and secure money network," said David Marcus, co-founder and CEO of Lightspark. "To bring Bitcoin into the regulated payments era, we need modern identity and trust layers. Proof's digital credentials make it possible for senders and receivers to verify each other in real time - unlocking fast, compliant, and trusted payments on Bitcoin at scale." Proof has already secured over $500 billion in traditional financial transactions across banking, real estate, and insurance. Leveraging the insights from this unique dataset, Proof can verify consumer identities for transactions with Proof's Certify, a reusable digital identity product. Consumers can verify their identities once and then safely send or receive crypto knowing that they are transacting with the right person. By applying the same cryptographic verification principles that secure banking, real estate, retirement, and insurance transactions to digital assets, Proof is creating the trust infrastructure necessary for mainstream crypto adoption. Comprehensive Travel Rule Compliance Solution This consumer trust approach also streamlines regulatory compliance. Certify provides a seamless approach to sharing identity information, performing sanctions screening, and meeting regulatory obligations at the customer level. The platform integrates with existing financial reporting requirements known as Travel Rule mandates, enabling providers to efficiently perform KYC checks and securely share necessary information across payment rails. This capability bridges the gap between digital asset providers and traditional banks, enabling seamless integration while meeting all compliance expectations and accelerating stablecoin adoption. About Proof Proof is the trusted platform for securing the digital economy. As critical commerce shifts online, Proof empowers companies to verify who is behind every digital interaction. From pioneering remote online notarization to launching a comprehensive identity authorization network, Proof secures transactions with industry-leading compliance and fraud prevention. Trusted by 8,000 organizations across financial services, government, real estate, and healthcare, Proof is defining trust in digital transactions. For more information, visit www.proof.com.

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. 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. 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.