Stripe to end Bitcoin payments
Stripe, the mobile payments processor that helps more than 100,000 business do transactions online, is officially shutting down Bitcoin payments on their site.
The company which has a market value of $9bn was one of the first sites to support Bitcoin and it allowed its clients to accept cryptocurrency payments. Many saw this as a clear acceptance of Bitcoin but the heavy commissions and the slow transactions have blocked the network.
Stripe has published a blog post explaining why it’s had a change of heart about Bitcoin.
The company said it believed in the possibilities of cryptocurrencies and that it had hoped that Bitcoin would one day become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions.
“Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange (...) This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments.
“Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal.”
Because of this, their clients are less keen on accepting Bitcoin payments. It has pushed Stripe to wind down the support for Bitcoin.
There will be a three month transition until they fully stop processing the cryptocurrency transactions (April 23 of 2018).
But although they are shutting down their support for Bitcoin they’re still optimistic about cryptocurrencies in general.
“There are a lot of efforts that we view as promising and that we can certainly imagine enabling support for in the future.”