Stripe Enables Merchants to Accept Stablecoin Payments for Online Transactions

In the first 24 hours of allowing its merchants to accept stablecoin payments for online transactions on its platform, Stripe reportedly saw that customers from more than 70 countries made purchases with that form of payment.

Stripe authorized its merchants in the United States to receive the Circle-issued USDC through their online checkout pages, beginning Wednesday (Oct. 9), Bloomberg reported Thursday (Oct. 10).

Jay Shah, head of product at Stripe, said the stablecoin option enables merchants to accept payments from around the world, according to the report.

The ability to accept stablecoin payments from customers around the world is one of several product updates added to Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, Will Gaybrick, president, product and business at Stripe, said in a Wednesday blog post.

The Pay with Crypto feature lets merchants accept stablecoin payments that settle as fiat in the Stripe balance, according to a Stripe webpage devoted to the topic.

“You can accept USDC payments on Ethereum, Solana and Polygon without the complexity of holding or converting crypto yourself,” the page said. “We charge 1.5% of the transaction amount (in USD).”

Stripe said in April that it would bring back crypto payments after stopping them in 2018.

At that time, when the company was enabling bitcoin payments, the it found that the experience was “pretty terrible” and that there was a lack of demand.

In April, John Collison, co-founder of Stripe, said that there have been a lot of technical improvements in crypto, that transaction speeds have gone up, that fees have gone down, that stablecoins are becoming “more stable” and that crypto has found “real utility.”

During a company keynote entitled “The Future of Payments,” Collison said: “With transaction speeds increasing and costs coming down, we’re seeing crypto finally making sense as a means of exchange.”

PYMNTS Intelligence found in June 2022 that 77% of merchants that accept crypto payments said they did so because of lower transaction processing fees relative to other payment methods.

In addition, 32% of merchants that were expanding their usage of crypto said they were doing so because they believed it could help them reach new customers, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and BitPay collaboration, “Paying With Cryptocurrency: What Consumers and Merchants Expect From Digital Currencies.”