Stripe Exploring Blockchain, Builds Team for Crypto Payments
Financial technology firm Stripe, a leading payments solutions provider in the U.S. as well as other regions, is now re-exploring blockchain integration with its services.
The firm, which began its foray into crypto with Bitcoin back in 2014, later withdrew support for the alpha cryptocurrency, citing slow transaction times and soaring transaction fees. Stripe later added that it was concerned that a viable crypto payments integration was not on the horizon, because, at the time, the development of the Lightning Network was still ongoing.
Stripe also cited the potential of projects emerging from or in parallel to the Ethereum blockchain, although at the time, decentralized finance had not yet matured to what it is now.
It appears that the payments firm, now valued at over $100 billion, is re-entering the crypto and blockchain space, or is preparing to do so on a massive scale. According to a job listing on Stripe’s own website, the firm is fielding potential candidates for four engineering positions which require experience in the crypto sector. Guillaume Poncin, Stripe’s Head of Engineering for Crypto, took to Twitter to announce the opening:
According to the listing, the open roles will help “ […] lay the foundation to support and inform Stripe’s crypto strategy,” and would require over a decade of experience in “designing and engineering large-scale systems.”
Stripe says that the crypto space has a growing need for “better building blocks” to accept payments, move funds, and exchange between fiat and crypto, among others. The firm claims that, with its renewed initiative into the crypto space, these needs may be addressed with “faster, more trustworthy, and higher quality crypto-enabled experiences.”
John Collison, Stripe co-founder and president, quoted Poncin’s tweet and said:
“Stripe and crypto have grown up at the same time; we started writing code the year after the Bitcoin paper dropped. We’ve always kept an eye on things (e.g. bitcoin support 2013-2015) but last few years’ developments (L2s, new chains, stablecoins, DeFi) are particularly exciting.”
Collison has hinted on Stripe’s crypto strategies sometime in June, when he stated in an interview with Bloomberg TV following his company’s $95 billion valuation, that people and crypto and Stripe are similar in that both are trying to resolve difficulties that have similar solutions.
“If you think of the kind of world that crypto people and we are trying to bring about, I think it’s a very related set of goals. We are stuck down at this level where only a fifth of interactions are cross border, crypto is one very exciting direction for trying to solve that,” Collison said.
Stripe’s latest initiatives of building into the crypto scene follows its competitors recent moves, with Square, PayPal, and Mastercard all engaging the crypto sector in recent months with multiple projects and partnerships. Stripe’s renewed interest in crypto will likely accelerate mass adoption of the technology, with its payments platform currently servicing over 784,256 active websites.
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