Stripe has started accepting cryptocurrency as a means of payment again, four years after the online payments company dropped support for bitcoin (BTC), according to co-founder John Collison.
? “Stripe now supports crypto businesses: exchanges, on-ramps, wallets, and non-fungible token marketplaces,” Collison on Twitter on March 10. “Not just pay-ins but payouts, know-your-customer (KYC) and identity verification, fraud prevention, and lots more.”
? The Irish-American firm ended support for BTC payments in January 2018. It said at the time that the digital asset had “evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange.”
? But as transaction fees began to fall and settlement times improved, the e-commerce platform has started to again integrate crypto-based payments.
? According to its website, the company will allow crypto businesses to “process payments for fiat currencies globally through a single integration with fraud prevention and authorization optimization built-in.”
? Stripe, which processes payments for companies like Google and Amazon, said the toolkit for crypto entities includes API integrations like Stripe Connect, which allows users to pay out fiat currencies in over 45 countries, and Stripe Identity, an identity-verification system to curb fraud.
? The company is working with Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange and Blockchain.com to improve payments processing and build a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp for the crypto exchanges. Stripe says this will “broaden consumer access” to digital currencies.
? FTX president Brett Harrison said in a in November that the crypto-asset exchange had seen “greatly increased speed of KYC processing,” with Stripe.
