Original author: shushu
After 6 years, traditional payment giant Stripe once again accepts cryptocurrency payments.
On April 26, Stripe co-founder and president John Collison announced in his keynote speech at the Global Internet Conference that Stripe will re-enable cryptocurrency as a way to accept payments. Stripe will support USDC stablecoin payments on Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon. John said, This time we will provide a better experience. He also demonstrated how to use USDC for payment at the conference.
In Johns demonstration video, you can see that Strides current payment interface already includes Crypto options, and users can use Solanas on-chain wallet Phantom to make payments. Stride said that payments made in stablecoins will be automatically converted into fiat currency and deposited into the merchants Stripe account.
Stripe was founded in 2009 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison. Back in 2014, Stripe became one of the first major companies to accept Bitcoin payments, however its cryptocurrency plans failed in 2018. The reason given was that Bitcoin was too volatile and unstable. That year Bitcoin fell from a high of $19,650 in December 2017 to $3,401 at the end of 2018.
In a statement at the time, Stripe said, As block size reaches its limit, Bitcoin has evolved into an asset rather than a means of exchange. This has caused Bitcoin to become less useful for payments.
In June 2019, Facebook entered the cryptocurrency field and Stripe became one of the founding members of Libra. But in October of the same year, Stripe, along with other companies, gave up its support for Facebook.
It was not until March 2022 that Stripe announced its return to the crypto field. John Collison posted on social media that Stripe already supports crypto businesses, trading platforms, portals, wallets and NFT markets, not just payments, but also KYC and identity authentication, fraud prevention, etc.
Then came a series of actions by businesses supporting crypto payments. In April, Stripe announced that it would use Polygon to pilot crypto payments on Twitter, initially supporting only USDC transfers on Polygon. In May, it partnered with OpenNode, a Bitcoin payment infrastructure platform, to provide Stripes merchant users with an instant service to convert incoming payments into Bitcoin. In September, Stripe announced that it had enabled the USDC payment function for freelancers. In December, it launched a fiat-to-cryptocurrency payment product for Web3 enterprises, which is a customizable widget that developers can embed directly into their DEX, NFT platform, wallet or DApp.
However, as the entire crypto market turned into a bear market, Stripe also faced negative impacts such as layoffs and declining valuations. However, in March 2023, Stripe completed a $6.5 billion Series I financing with a valuation of $50 billion. Participants included a16z, Baillie Gifford, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, MSD Partners, Thrive Capital, GIC, Goldman Sachs and Temasek.
In 2023, Stripe did not have many business moves in the crypto field, but during this period, another traditional payment giant PayPal also chose to enter the crypto field. Last August, PayPal announced the launch of the stablecoin PayPal USD (PYUSD), which is issued by Paxos Trust (formerly BUSD issuer) and is fully supported by US dollar deposits, short-term Treasury bonds and similar cash equivalents, and will gradually be opened to PayPals customers in the United States.
Related reading: PayPal launches stablecoin, the crypto compliance portal for 430 million people is here
PayPal is Stripes most important competitor in the payment market. Stripe targets businesses of all sizes, while PayPal targets small businesses. In 2023, PayPal has a 42.35% share, Stripe has a 19.44% share, in addition, Shopify Payment has a 12.42% share, and Amazon Payment has a 4.76% share. The two payment giants PayPal and Stripe, which control most of the global payment business, have invested in the cryptocurrency field, and we are getting closer and closer to Mass Adoption in crypto payments.
