Stripe goes all in on crypto with comprehensive support for businesses

Online payments company Stripe’s move back into cryptocurrencies has deepened with the firm announcing a new comprehensive solution to support crypto-focused businesses, including exchanges, wallet providers and NFT marketplaces.

Stripe, which is dual-headquartered in Dublin and San Francisco, said it will now offer fiat payments API integration for businesses to process crypto-to-fiat currency payments.

The decision is signficant. Crypto companies have generally been poorly served by payments providers, with many privately complaining of poor authorisation rates and reliability. Stripe is seeking to bring its highly-regarded payments infrastructure to help such businesses in a move that will bolster efforts to make cryto more acceptable.

Co-founder John Collison said in a tweet that the company now supports all crypto businesses, “not just for pay-ins, but also for payouts, Know Your Customer (KYC) and identity verification, fraud prevention and lots more”.

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The move by Stripe comes months after the fast-growing company said it was hiring engineers and designers as part of a US-based team to “build the future of Web3 payments”.

Rapid growth

Founded by Patrick and John Collison in 2010, Stripe was early in supporting the crypto community, becoming the first major payments company to allow bitcoin in 2014. It ended support for it in early 2018, however, saying it had become an asset to be traded, rather than a means of exchange. This, it said, meant it was becoming less useful for payments.

As part of its move back into crypto, the company on Thursday announced support for leading exchange FTX, whose services include deriviaties and options trading. The platform has raised $1.8 billion (€1.6 billion) from heavyweight backers such as Temasek and SoftBank.

After two years of rapid growth, FTX is turning its attention to the broader consumer investor community. It has chosen Stripe to build an onboarding and identity verification solution for users joining the exchange, and to power payments for those adding funds to their FTX account.

As of January 2022, investors were trading an average of $14 billion (€12.7 billion) worth of assets on FTX every day.

Stripe was earlier this week named as the “most innovative company in the world” in a prestigious list compiled by Fast Company.

It received the accolade for “kick-starting the carbon-removal industry” with Stripe Climate, which allows customers to direct a fraction of their revenue to help scale emerging carbon-removal technologies.