Bulletins

Stripe will hire a crypto team, 3 years after dropping bitcoin support

Stripe will hire a crypto team, 3 years after dropping bitcoin support

Stripe is building a crypto team three years after ending support for bitcoin.

Image: Stripe

Stripe is building a crypto team, three years after the fintech powerhouse shut down support for bitcoin.

"I'm hiring engineers and designers to build the future of Web3 payments," Guillaume Poncin, Stripe's head of engineering for crypto, said in a tweet. Poncin had been the company's engineering head for banking and financial products before taking on his new role in September.

Poncin linked to Stripe's jobs page, which listed four crypto engineer openings.

Stripe became the first major payments company to support payments in bitcoin in 2014. The company hoped bitcoin "could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive," a former product manager, Tom Karlo, said in a blog post in 2018.

But bitcoin "evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange," and became "less useful for payments," Karlo added, citing rising transaction confirmation times, failure rates and fees.

Stripe continued to pay attention to crypto even after ending support for bitcoin following that blog post, a company source told Protocol. The company is ramping up its crypto efforts at a time when the crypto market, which now includes new crypto currencies, is growing rapidly.

"In 2018, we said that Stripe would 'look for opportunities to help our customers by adding support for crypto in the future'" Edwin Wee, a member of Stripe's user relations team, said in a tweet. "That time has come."

Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.

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