Stripe, a well-known global payments giant, has re-entered the crypto market by allowing customers to accept crypto payments in USD Coin (USDC).
This move comes a few months after the payment company announced in April that “crypto payments are coming back to Stripe.”
Stripe Dropped Support For Bitcoin (BTC) And Crypto Payments
About ten years ago, in 2014, Stripe tapped into the crypto ecosystem by launching crypto payments with Bitcoin (BTC) support. The payment giant discontinued this service four years later, in 2018, citing Bitcoin’s undue volatility.
The company also criticized Bitcoin for its long transaction time and increasing gas fees. Stripe concluded that Bitcoin would function better as an asset instead of a medium of exchange.
That same year, the price of Bitcoin dropped from a high of about $19K+ in December 2017 to about $3K+ at the end of 2018.
Stripes Failed Effort To Re-enter The Crypto Space
The following year, Stripe took a giant step to re-enter the crypto market by co-founding the Libra project with Facebook. However, the fintech company stepped away from Libra later that year, and the project never got off the ground.
Stripe launched a project to facilitate fiat-to-crypto payment systems in 2022. At that time, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison stated that,
Cryptocurrency is finding real utility…With transaction speeds increasing and costs coming down, we are seeing cryptocurrency finally making sense as a means of exchange.
In April 2024, Jeff Weinstein, a product lead at Stripe, revealed that the payment giant would re-introduce crypto payments using USDC across ETH, SOL, and Polygon networks.
Collison also made a similar announcement via an X post, stating that “Stripe will start supporting global stablecoin payments this summer.”
Stripe Relaunch Its Crypto Payment Support in USDC
On Wednesday, October 9, 2024, Strip fulfilled its April promise to re-introduce crypto payment support. However, the payment company will only support USDC at this time, as announced earlier.
According to the post, users can now
Accept USDC payments on ETH, SOl, and Polygon without the complexity of holding or converting cryptocurrency to fiat.
Stripe added that,
Transaction limits…are 10,000 USD per transaction and 100,000 USD per month,” and it will “charge 1.5% of the transaction amount (in USD).
With this development, Stripe is following its major rival, PayPal, to support crypto transactions. Last year, in May, PayPal launched PayPal USD (PYUSD), its USD-denominated stablecoin, on the Solana blockchain as a payment option.
Last month, PayPal also released a statement announcing that its US merchants will now be allowed to buy, hold, and sell digital assets directly from their business accounts.
Following this move, the payment giant aims to simplify cryptocurrency transactions by automatically converting USDC into fiat currency and settling them through a merchant’s Stripe account.
