In the morning news on November 26, Beijing time, John Collison, co-founder of American online payment company Stripe, said that Strip does not rule out the possibility of accepting cryptocurrency as a payment method in the future.

Stripe stopped supporting Bitcoin payments in 2018, citing the obvious price fluctuations of Bitcoin and the low efficiency of daily transactions.

However, when attending the Abu Dhabi Fintech Festival on Tuesday, Collison said: “To different people, cryptocurrency means different things.” Certain aspects of cryptocurrency, such as being used as a speculative tool, “It has nothing to do with the work we have done at Stripe”, but “a lot of recent developments have made cryptocurrency better, especially as a payment method that has good scalability and acceptable cost.”

When asked whether Stripe will re-accept cryptocurrency as a payment method, Collison said: “We will not yet, but I don’t think this possibility can be completely ruled out.”

Stripe recently formed a team dedicated to exploring cryptocurrency and Web3, which is a brand new, decentralized version of the Internet. Guillaume Poncin, Stripe’s head of engineering, is in charge of this work. Earlier this month, the company appointed Matt Huang, the co-founder of Paradigm, a cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm, to the board of directors.

Collison pointed out that some potential innovations are emerging in the field of digital assets, including Solana, a competitor of the world’s second-largest digital currency, Ethereum, and “layer two” systems such as the Bitcoin Lightning Network. The latter can speed up transactions and process transactions at a lower cost.

Stripe was founded in 2009 and has now become the largest unlisted financial technology company in the United States. Its most recent valuation is US$95 billion. Investors include Baillie Gifford, Sequoia Capital, and Anderson-Horowitz. Stripe handles payment and settlement for companies such as Google, Amazon and Uber, and is also exploring other business areas, including loan and tax management.


Post time: Nov-26-2021