Stripe Joins The Crypto Party After Missing Out On The BTC Bounce

Stripe joins the crypto party as we can see the payment processor hiring four engineers for its new crypto team, right after Bitcoin started bouncing in value so let’s read more in our latest crypto news today.

Payment processor Stripe joins the crypto party by hiring four engineers for its crypto team, despite the company stopping Bitcoin payments back in 2018. Stripe makes it easy for companies like Amazon to get paid easily and now the new engineers will form the foundation of the new crypto team. According to the job posting says that the engineers will design and build the core components that the company needs to support crypto use cases. The job posts mentioned the company’s early adoption of crypto back in 2014 when it became the first major payments company to launch BTC acceptance.

We’re starting a new crypto team at @Stripe. I’m hiring engineers and designers to build the future of Web3 payments: https://t.co/A40QPCw3XG. pic.twitter.com/ygYTrA125T

— Guillaume Poncin (@gponcin) October 12, 2021

Stripe however didn’t stick around long enough to see BTC go all the way from $500  to $50,000 today as it decide to stop BTC payments in 2018. Tom Karlo, former product manager of the Global Payment Methods team, wrote that Bitcoin’s success as an asset class made it quite less useful for payments and noted that the increased transaction confirmation times and high fees were one of the reasons why they stop using it for their company’s needs. While these issues still have to be sorted out, the average transaction fees climbed above $20 just as they did in 2018 but the desire for a bitcoin payment solution is growing and other companies are working on solutions.

Stripe geared its services to online businesses and competitor Square moved beyond just services for retail businesses that are looking to allow their customers to pay with more than cash. Square’s founder Jack Dorsey, holds millions in BTC in its treasury and even pushed offerings to allow people to buy it on his Cash App. It revealed its building a BTC division called TBD and worked on a decentralized crypto exchange. Stripe already hired experts that are working on the crypto strategy and wants to develop a short-term roadmap on how to get further:

“We hear a growing need from developers and users in that space for better building blocks to accept payments, move funds, exchange between fiat and crypto, etc.”