Stripe to bring back crypto payments in the next few months

Global payments company Stripe announced that it was going to start allowing crypto payments on Thursday at the company’s Global Internet Economy conference.

Speaking at the final keynote, titled the Future of Payments, Stripe’s president John Collison, said, “our history with crypto goes back a long time.” He cited the company’s now-defunct bitcoin support back in 2018 because it wasn’t being used.

“We’re excited to announce that we’re bringing back crypto as a way to accept payments, but this time with a much better experience,” he announced.

Due to the fact that crypto has more use cases and, as Collison’s presentation said, “crypto’s back,” Stripe decided to bring back crypto payments.

“Crypto is finding real utility,” Collison said. “With transaction speeds increasing and costs coming down, we’re seeing crypto finally making sense as a means of exchange.”

The feature, he added, will be available later this summer.

The company hasn’t made any crypto-centric announcements since last year.

Collison told Axios last spring that the company saw potential in crypto, though it wasn’t going to switch its strategy to focus more on the space.

Collison said at the time that, despite the fact that some of their early crypto products faced a lack of demand, the company was still interested in the role crypto could play in the future.

Just last May, Stripe debuted a fiat-to-crypto onramp.

“The embeddable onramp is helpful for Web3 companies that want to fully customize the branding and customer experience, while the Stripe-hosted option provides an even easier way for users to get started,” the company said in a press release at the time.

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