Stripe is bringing back Crypto Payments starting with USDC Stablecoin
After a 6-year break, Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, announced on Thursday at the company’s Global Internet Economy conference that it would start accepting cryptocurrency payments, starting with USDC stablecoin.
Crypto is back. @Stripe will start supporting global stablecoin payments this summer. Transactions instantly settle on-chain and automatically convert to fiat. Join the waitlist https://t.co/hws2OsU3Id and watch the demo (h/t @Solana) from Sessions. pic.twitter.com/zGKYW2FM6i
— John Collison (@collision) April 25, 2024
The fintech giant would initially let customers accept USDC only on the Ethereum, Polygon, and Solana networks.
In 2018, Stripe announced that it would start accepting bitcoin (BTC). However, it stopped due to BTC being too unstable. Four years later, payment processor Stripe tried its first reentry into the crypto market after it announced that it would let clients make payments in USDC stablecoin via the Polygon network, starting with X (formerly known as Twitter).
This move was to help enable Stripe’s customers to pay sellers, content creators, freelancers, and service providers using USDC stablecoins native to Polygon’s network.
Stripe’s president and co-founder, John Collison, speaking at the final keynote session titled “Future of Payments," said the company's history with crypto goes back a long time. Citing Stripe bitcoin support back in 2018, there was no longing function because it wasn’t being used.
He added, We’re excited to announce that the company is bringing back crypto as a way to accept payments with a much better experience than before. Cryptocurrency solves the problem of transaction speeds increasing and costs coming down, which makes digital assets a better means of exchange.
The feature that settles transactions instantly on-chain and automatically converts to fiat will be available this summer. Users can join the waitlist: https://stripe.com/use-cases/crypto#request-invite
The company is a bit late to the party about opening up its platform to digital currencies. Other major payment processors, such as Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, already support the transfer of cryptocurrencies. However, we hope to see more stablecoins supported on the Stripe platform.
In September 2023, Visa announced it had rolled out support for USDC stablecoin payments on the Solana blockchain, and in March this year, MetaMask and Mastercard partnered to issue a payment card by Baanx, which is the first entirely on-chain card that will let users spend crypto on everyday purchases, everywhere cards are accepted.
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