Author: shushu

After 6 years, the traditional payment industry giant Stripe once again accepts cryptocurrency payments.

On April 26, John Collison, co-founder and president of Stripe, announced at the Global Internet Conference that Stripe will re-enable cryptocurrency as a payment method. Stripe will support USDC stablecoin payments on Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon. John stated, "This time we will provide a better experience," and demonstrated how to use USDC for payments at the conference.

In John's demonstration video, it can be seen that Stripe's current payment interface includes the Crypto option, and users can use the Phantom wallet on the Solana chain for payments. Stripe stated that payments made with stablecoins will be automatically converted to fiat currency and deposited into the merchant's Stripe account.

Stripe was founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison in 2009. As early as 2014, Stripe was one of the first major companies to accept Bitcoin payments. However, its cryptocurrency plan failed in 2018. The reason given was that Bitcoin's volatility was too high and unstable. In that year, Bitcoin fell from its high point of $19,650 in December 2017 to $3,401 at the end of 2018.

In a statement at the time, Stripe stated, "As the block size limit is reached, Bitcoin has evolved into an asset rather than a means of exchange. This has made Bitcoin less useful for payments."

In June 2019, Facebook entered the cryptocurrency field, and Stripe became one of the founding members of Libra. However, in October of the same year, Stripe and other companies withdrew their support for Facebook.

It wasn't until March 2022 that Stripe announced its return to the cryptocurrency field. John Collison posted on social media that Stripe now supports cryptocurrency businesses, trading platforms, gateways, wallets, NFT markets, not just payments, but also KYC and identity verification, fraud prevention, and more.

This was followed by a series of actions to support cryptocurrency payments. In April, Stripe announced a trial of encrypted payments using Polygon on Twitter, initially supporting transfers of USDC on Polygon. In May, it partnered with the Bitcoin payment infrastructure platform OpenNode to provide instant conversion of received payments to Bitcoin for Stripe's merchant users. In September, Stripe announced the activation of USDC payments 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 cryptocurrency market entered a bear market, Stripe also faced negative impacts such as layoffs and a decrease in valuation. However, in March 2023, Stripe completed a Series I financing round with a valuation of $50 billion and raised $6.5 billion. Investors included a16z, Baillie Gifford, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, MSD Partners, Thrive Capital, GIC, Goldman Sachs, and Temasek.

In 2023, Stripe's business actions in the cryptocurrency field were not many. However, during this period, another traditional payment giant, PayPal, also chose to enter the cryptocurrency field. In August of last year, PayPal announced the launch of the stablecoin PayPal USD (PYUSD), which is issued by Paxos Trust (the former issuer of BUSD), fully backed by US dollar deposits, short-term government bonds, and similar cash equivalents, and will gradually be made available to PayPal's customers in the United States.

PayPal is the most important competitor of Stripe in the payment market. Stripe targets businesses of various sizes, while PayPal focuses on small businesses. In 2023, PayPal holds a 42.35% market share, Stripe holds a 19.44% market share, in addition, Shopify Payments holds a 12.42% market share, and Amazon Payments holds a 4.76% market share. The two major payment giants, PayPal and Stripe, which control most of the global payment business, have both entered the cryptocurrency field. We are getting closer to mass adoption in cryptocurrency payments.

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