After four years of ditching Bitcoin (BTC), online payment giant Stripe has re-entered the crypto space with the launch of a suite of products to support crypto businesses.
Stripe is a payment infrastructure platform that provides businesses with the tools they need to take payments online. The San Francisco based firm offers a simple, flexible, and scalable way for companies to accept payments from anywhere in the world.
According to its website, millions of businesses — including tech titans such as Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft — use Stripe’s software and APIs to run and scale their businesses.
Stripe’s John Collison announced on Twitter recently that his company now supports crypto businesses, including exchanges, on-ramps, wallets, and NFT marketplaces.
Stripe now supports crypto businesses: exchanges, on-ramps, wallets, and NFT marketplaces. Not just pay-ins but payouts, KYC and identity verification, fraud prevention, and lots more. https://t.co/3X173SkdPd
— John Collison (@collision) March 10, 2022
In 2014, Stripe became one of the first major companies to support Bitcoin payments. However, the co. stopped being a payment processor for the virtual currency in April 2018 citing rising fees and longer transaction times, which led it to its decision to scrap support for BTC payments.
“Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense,” Stripe said at the time, noting that the cyrpto seemed “better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange.”
Four years after Stripe saw the cryptocurrency as an asset to be traded, rather than something to make payments with, the company explained in a blog post, “We’ve learned that our optimism for the future of crypto was not unfounded.” The online payments platform elaborated:
From new developments in blockchain infrastructure to widespread interest from major financial institutions, crypto is going mainstream.
Stripe also said that to better support its “customers and continue to grow the GDP of the internet”, it is “working to give crypto businesses access to today’s global financial infrastructure — starting by partnering with FTX and Blockchain.com to broaden consumer access to crypto.”
It’s been a long time coming, but Stripe is finally back in the crypto game.
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