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Co-founder John Collison says crypto is ‘back’ a month after bitcoin reached a record high, as the fintech giant attempts to woo more customers across its services.
Stripe is slowly bringing back crypto payments as part of its services after a six-year hiatus.
At its annual user conference Sessions yesterday (25 April), co-founder John Collison revealed that the fintech will start supporting global crypto payments this summer, starting with USDC stablecoins – a relatively stable cryptocurrency – on the Ethereum, Solana and Polygon blockchains.
“Crypto is back,” he wrote on X, sharing a video of the demo from Sessions and sharing a link to the waitlist. “Stripe will start supporting global stablecoin payments this summer. Transactions instantly settle on-chain and automatically convert to fiat.”
Stripe used to allow bitcoin payments on its platform until 2018, when it stopped the service owning to an increasingly volatile and unstable crypto market. The company briefly made a comeback in the space with a Twitter collaboration in 2022 to test crypto payouts, but this was soon rescinded.
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
Now, with bitcoin reaching a record high in value last month as investor interest resurges, Stripe wants to slowly, but carefully, dip its toes back in. This comes amid a general push to woo more new customers as the company announced it will split its payments service from other services to make the platform more modular. The move means that customers will be able to use some of Stripe’s services without needing to be clients of its main payments platform.
Stripe described their previous approach as an “all-or-nothing” proposition that cut off a chunk of potential users from onboarding to its platform, such as large enterprises that are unable to breach existing long-term contracts.
In recent years, speculation has been growing around a potential Stripe IPO. It was valued at $65bn in February and raised $694m in a stock sale earlier this month. The company said it processed more than $1trn in payments last year.
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