After the company postponed BTC transactions in 2018, Stripe is ready to bring back a crypto payment option in the form of stablecoin transfers this summer.
Stripe co-founder and president John Collison has announced the return of stablecoin payments at the company’s developers conference in San Francisco on April 25.
“We’re bringing back crypto as a way to accept payments, but this time with a much better experience with stablecoins,” said Collison.
Transactions in USDC on the Stripe platform will instantly settle on-chain and automatically convert to fiat. The stablecoin settlements will occur on the Solana, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains.
Stripe first adopted Bitcoin payments in 2014. “At the time, Bitcoin was a pretty terrible payment method,” Collison explained speaking of the reasons the firm discontinued the service four years later.
However, Stripe didn’t fully abandon crypto support. For instance, in 2022, the payment provider launched global crypto payouts for marketplace and social media platform sellers, freelancers, content creators, and service providers. Stripe and X (then Twitter) introduced this program to enable creators’ payments in USDC on Polygon.
Besides, Stripe created fiat-to-crypto on-ramps via application programming interfaces (APIs). The firm began hosting a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp for U.S. customers, providing compliance with Know Your Customer and fraud prevention policies.
