Stripe is planning to restore bitcoin (BTC) and, by extension, cryptocurrency payments later this summer. At first, the service will only support payments made via Circle's USDC stablecoin platform.
At the company's Global Internet Economy conference on Thursday, Stripe co-founder and president John Collison said, "We're excited to announce that we're bringing back crypto as a way to accept payments, but this time with a much better experience."
With cryptocurrencies, the payments processor has a long history; it joined the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2014. It gave up on all attempts four years later, in 2018, saying bitcoin was too erratic and would be an asset rather than a currency. It questioned its lengthy transaction times and then-rising prices as well.
During that year, bitcoin had its first "crypto winter," declining from a high of $19,650 in December 2017 to $3,401 by the end of 2018.
The banking giant tried to get back into the market the next year by co-founding Facebook's Libra project, but it withdrew later that year and Libra never got off the ground. A project to allow fiat-to-crypto transfers was started by Stripe in 2022.
"Crypto is finding real utility," Collison said in his Thursday talk. "We are seeing cryptocurrency finally making sense as a means of exchange with transaction speeds increasing and costs coming down."
Stripe said that transactions will be supported on the blockchains of Polygon (MATIC), Ethereum (ETH), and Solana (SOL).
As per Bloomberg, the company is one of the biggest payment providers in the world, valued at $65 billion at the moment, and by 2023, over $1 trillion in transactions are predicted.
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