Stripe is reconsidering accepting cryptocurrency for payments after ending support for bitcoin in 2018, Stripe Co-founder and President John Collison said at the Fintech Abu Dhabi festival this week during a panel moderated by CNBC.
The digital payments firm dropped bitcoin support due to unstable prices and the difficulty in using it for typical transactions. At the time, Stripe said in a blog post that bitcoin “has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange.” As a result, the firm said, bitcoin has become less useful for payments.
“Crypto obviously means a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” Collison said at the panel on Tuesday (Nov. 23), adding that there are areas relating to crypto, such as speculative investing, that aren’t “relevant to what we do at Stripe.”
See also: Stripe Seeks Talent for Crypto Strategy Team
Regardless, recent developments in crypto are making it more appealing as a payment option and although the company doesn’t have active plans in the works, accepting crypto is “not implausible.”
Tara Seshan, business lead at Stripe Treasury, told PYMNTS in a recent interview that there is a place for crypto in business payments, but the company isn’t quite there yet.
“It’s certainly a space that we’re paying very, very close attention to,” Seshan said.
Read more: Stripe Says B2B Digital Payments Transformation Is in ‘Early Innings’
Stripe developed a team led by Guillaume Poncin, the firm’s head of engineering, that is solely devoted to digging into crypto and Web3, a decentralized internet that is supposed to be the future. Stripe also appointed Matt Huang, Paradigm co-founder, to its board of directors.
Launched in 2011 and dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, Stripe is the largest privately held FinTech in the U.S. and was last valued at $95 billion. It processes payments for some of the world’s biggest companies, including Google, Amazon and Uber and also offers loans and tax management.
The company has over 4,000 employees across 14 offices worldwide.
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