Bringing back crypto payments, this time in stablecoins

Payment service Stripe is bringing back crypto in the form of stablecoin payments, co-founder and president John Collison announced. He said the new service will be available this summer.

Crypto will eventually make sense as an exchange, Collison told an audience at the company's developers conference in San Francisco on April 25. Since Stripe discontinued the Bitcoin (BTC) payment option in 2018, transaction times have increased and fees have decreased. And stablecoins are performing steadily.

“No one has told stablecoin if we're going to be in the crypto winter post 2021,” Collison said, referring to the stablecoin price chart that was posted. in order to –

We're bringing back crypto as a way to accept payments, but this time we've had a much better experience with stablecoins.

Collison proved his point by conducting an on-stage transaction. Stripe offers payment services using USD Coin (USDC) on the Solana, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains.

In addition to the stability Collison finds in the USDC, the dollar peg makes it a price repository. “You have a lot of money that I don't see in the U.S.,” Collison said before showing a chart of the stablecoin's usage against the Turkish lira on a crypto exchange.

Stripe was the first major payment provider to accept Bitcoin in 2014. “At the time, Bitcoin was a terrible payment method,” Collison said, explaining that it was discontinued after four years.

But Stripe hasn't completely turned its back on crypto. He was one of the participants in Facebook's ill-fated Libra project, before he backed out under pressure from US politicians. In 2021, he started rebuilding his crypto engineering team.

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Stripe is the payment processor for payments on X. In 2022, Stripe and X (and then Twitter) introduced a program that allowed creators on the social platform to receive payments in USD through Polygon. After that, he developed crypto-to-crypto on-ramps through application programming interfaces (APIs) in partnership with cryptocurrency exchanges.

It began handling the fiat-to-crypto on-ramp for US customers by taking on conversion and compliance obligations such as know-your-customer and fraud prevention. This move was to follow the examples of Venmo and Robinhood.

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