Later this year, Stripe will reintroduce Crypto Payments, initially only for the USDC Circle stablecoin, on the Solana, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains . The fintech giant stopped supporting Bitcoin in 2018, during the first Crypto .
Six years after ending support for Bitcoin (BTC) and therefore crypto payments in general, Stripe is bringing back the service later this summer, although initially only for the Circle USDC stablecoin.
“We're excited to announce that we're bringing back Crypto as a payment option, but this time with a much better experience,” Stripe co-founder and president John Collison said Thursday in a keynote address at the company's Global Internet conference.. Economics Conference.
The payment processor has a long history in Crypto, first tapping into the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2014. Four years later, in 2018, he stopped all these efforts, arguing that Bitcoin was too volatile and would function as an asset rather than a medium of exchange.. . At the time, he also criticized long transaction times and rising fees.
This year saw the first «Crypto» of Bitcoin, with the token's price falling from a high of $19,650 in December 2017 to $3,401 at the end of 2018.
The following year, the fintech giant took a step toward re-entering the market by co-founding Facebook's Libra project, but he left later that year and Libra never got off the ground.. In 2022, Stripe introduced a project to facilitate fiat-to-cryptocurrency transfers.
“Crypto is gaining real utility,” Collison said in his keynote on Thursday.. “With transaction speeds increasing and costs falling, we see Crypto finally making sense as a medium of exchange.”
According to Stripe, payments will be available on the Solana (SOL), Ethereum (ETH) and Polygon (MATIC) blockchains.
The company is currently valued at $65 billion and is ONE of the largest payments providers in the world with over $1 trillion in transaction volume in 2023, according to Bloomberg.