After 6 years, Stripe accepts Crypto again, joining PayPal's competition for crypto payments?

After 6 years, traditional payment giant Stripe is accepting cryptocurrency payments again.

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 actually demonstrated how to use USDC for payment at the conference.

In John's demonstration video, you can see that Stride's current payment interface already includes the Crypto option, and users can use Solana's on-chain wallet Phantom to pay. Stride said payments made in stablecoins will be automatically converted into fiat currency and deposited into the merchant's Stripe account.

As early as 2014, Stripe became one of the first major companies to accept Bitcoin payments, but its cryptocurrency plan 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 that "as the block size reaches its limit, Bitcoin has developed 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 support for Facebook.

Until March 2022, 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 verification, 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 Stripe's merchant users with services that instantly convert 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.

But as the entire crypto market turned into a bear market, Stripe also faced negative impacts such as layoffs and falling valuations. However, in March 2023, Stripe completed a $6.5 billion Series I financing with a valuation of $50 billion. Investors 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 encryption, but during this period, another traditional payment giant PayPal also chose to enter the encryption field. Last August, PayPal announced the launch of the stablecoin PayPal USD (PYUSD), which was 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 be gradually opened to PayPal's customers in the United States.

Related reading: PayPal launches stablecoin, the crypto compliance entrance for 430 million people is here

The two payment giants PayPal and Stripe, which control most of the global payment business, have invested in the field of cryptocurrency, and we are getting closer and closer to Mass Adoption in crypto payments.

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