Stripe Announces Decision to end Support for Bitcoin
Another company has decided to drop bitcoin. This time we are talking about payment processor Stripe, which revealed that it will no longer accept the cryptocurrency. The announcement was made by the product manager of the company on Tuesday.
Stripe's product manager, Tom Karlo, made the announcement that the company will end support for bitcoin in a blog post. The same announcement give a timeline for when this will enter into effect. So, Karlo revealed that the company will stop accepting bitcoin payments in April. This means that the company has established a three-month period to transition away from the cryptocurrency.
Stripe will end support for bitcoin as a payment form on April 23
The decision that Stripe has taken at this point is somewhat unexpected, as this company has actually been accepting bitcoin payments since 2014. This means that Stripe has been one of the early adopters and supporters of bitcoin. Of course, having this under consideration the most obvious question would be why has Stripe decided to end support for bitcoin.
According to Karlo, the decision was caused by the fact that the rate of transaction failure has increased, fees have grown a lot and this means that fewer people have started to make transactions involving bitcoin on Stripe. Karlo said:
“We’ve seen the desire from our customers to accept Bitcoin decrease. And of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.”
Karlo also revealed that the transition will be gradual over the next three months:
“Therefore, starting today, we are winding down support for Bitcoin payments. Over the next three months we will work with affected Stripe users to ensure a smooth transition before we stop processing Bitcoin transactions on April 23, 2018.”
Although Stripe will end support for bitcoin, it does not mean that the company does not believe in the future of cryptocurrencies. In fact, he claimed that the company is "very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall." Karlo also revealed that the company will remain attentive to future opportunities on adding support for cryptocurrencies.
