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Later this year, Stripe will reintroduce crypto payments via the Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon blockchains, initially only for Circle’s USDC stablecoin. The fintech giant stopped supporting Bitcoin in 2018 during the first crypto winter.
Six years after dropping support for Bitcoin (BTC) and therefore crypto payments, Stripe will offer the service again later this summer, but initially only for Circle’s USDC stablecoin.
“We’re excited to announce that we’re bringing crypto back as a way to accept payments, but this time with a much better experience,” Stripe co-founder and President John Collison said in a keynote at the company’s Global Internet Economy conference.
The payment processor has a long history in crypto, first starting to use the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2014. Four years later, in 2018, he stated that Bitcoin was too volatile and would function as an asset, not a medium of exchange, arguing that he abandoned all such efforts. He also criticized the long processing times and rising fees at the time.
2018 saw Bitcoin’s first “crypto winter”, with the token falling from $19,650 in December 2017 to a low of $3,401 by the end of 2018.
The fintech giant took a step to re-enter the market the following year and co-founded Facebook’s Libra project, but withdrew from the project the following year and Libra was never implemented. In 2022, Stripe launched a project to facilitate payments from fiat to cryptocurrencies.
“Crypto is finding real utility,” Collison said in his keynote on Thursday. “As transaction speeds increase and costs decrease, we are finally seeing crypto making sense as a medium of exchange.”
Stripe stated that payments will be possible on Solana (SOL), Ethereum (ETH) and Polygon (MATIC) blockchains.
The company is reportedly currently valued at $65 billion and is one of the largest payment providers globally, handling over $1 trillion in transactions by 2023, according to Bloomberg.
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