On Wednesday, global payments giant Stripe made good on its April promise to resume support for cryptocurrencies, marking six years since it first discontinued Bitcoin payments on its platform.
The San Francisco-based company has introduced a new payment option that allows businesses to accept USD Coin (USDC) from customers in more than 150 countries, Jeff Weinstein, Stripe’s head of product, said on Twitter (X ) was announced.
“Crypto on Stripe is officially back!” he tweeted. “Today, we’re rolling this out to hundreds of thousands of U.S. businesses.”
Support for more countries will be rolled out in the near future. Decrypt has come together to clarify that point.
In April, Weinstein announced that Stripe would initially support payments using USDC across the Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon networks.
After expanding its services in 2021, Stripe followed rival PayPal in offering crypto rails to support transactions. PayPal has begun allowing customers to make purchases at millions of merchants around the world using its “Checkout With Crypto” feature.
Following this approach, Stripe aims to simplify cryptocurrency transactions by automatically converting stablecoin payments to fiat and settling them through the merchant’s Stripe account.
The “Pay with Crypto” feature allows businesses to integrate stablecoin payments via Stripe Checkout, Elements, or Payment Intents APIs.
According to the product page, payment limits are set at $10,000 per transaction and $100,000 per month, and the company charges a 1.5% transaction fee.
Stripe’s reintroduction of cryptocurrency services comes after the company decided to end support for Bitcoin payments in 2018, citing concerns about market volatility, slow transaction speeds, and high fees. The company first started supporting Bitcoin payments in 2014.
Stripe also integrated with Avalanche to give users access to niche crypto products and NFT platforms running on the network.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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