Stripe, United States fintech company, is looking to re-enter the crypto sector with the formation of a new blockchain team to facilitate crypto payments for its consumers.
Three years after withdrawing support for Bitcoin owing to poor transaction times and rising fees, the $100 billion corporation is returning to the crypto market.
Stripe is looking for four “Staff Engineers” with experience in the crypto industry, according to a job listing page on the company’s website.
On Twitter earlier today, Guillaume Poncin, the head of engineering, indicated that he is searching for engineers and designers to “create the future of Web3 payments.”
The prospective engineers and designers will be responsible for “everything from web/mobile UIs to backend, payments, and identification systems,” according to the job description.
“We’re hearing a growing need from developers and users in that arena for better building blocks to take payments, move cash, and convert fiat for cryptocurrency, among other things.”
We want to produce faster, more trustworthy, and higher quality crypto-enabled experiences by concentrating on these problems and needs,” the description adds.
Stripe Co-founder John Collison responded to Poncin’s tweet by saying that “Stripe and crypto have grown up at the same time,” and that the company decided to enter the field after seeing “interesting” developments:
“We started writing code the year after the Bitcoin paper dropped. We’ve always kept an eye on things (e.g. Bitcoin support 2013-2015) but last few years’ developments (L2s, new chains, stablecoins, DeFi) are particularly exciting.”
After big competitors such as Square, Paypal, Mastercard, and Square all entered the crypto market, the company decided to accept crypto payments.
Square introduced BTC trading via its Cash App in 2018, Paypal announced crypto support for U.S. clients in October 2020, and Mastercard confirmed numerous crypto assets support on its network in February of this year.
Stripe began accepting Bitcoin (BTC) in 2014, but four years later dropped support owing to poor transaction times and escalating fees.
Stripe claimed in a blog post dated Jan. 23, 2018, that it may return to the industry once crypto payments are “viable,” citing the Lightning Network’s development and “high-potential” applications developing on the Ethereum blockchain as examples.
Collison intimated that the corporation was looking at crypto again earlier this year when he told Bloomberg TV that:
“If you think of the kind of world that crypto people and we are trying to bring about, I think it’s a very related set of goals.”
“We’re trapped at a point where barely a fifth of interactions are cross-border,” he continued. “Crypto is one very intriguing route for attempting to fix that.”
The digital payments startup, which was created in 2011, is now valued at approximately $100 billion. Stripe raised $600 million in a capital round in March 2021, valued at $95 billion, more than doubling its prior valuation of $35 billion from the previous year. Stripe’s payments infrastructure is currently used by 784,256 active websites, according to Built With statistics.
