Latest developments in the digital asset space are making crypto payments more scalable and cost-effective
Multinational financial services company Stripe co-founder John Collison said that the company has not completely ruled out the option of reintroducing cryptocurrency as a method of payment on its platforms.
Stripe ended its support for cryptocurrencies three years ago citing that the inherent volatility of the currency made it inefficient for payments.
In a CNBC-moderated panel at the Fintech Abu Dhabi festival, Collision explained that different aspects of cryptocurrencies appealed to individuals and institutions from different industries. For Stripe, the use of cryptocurrency as a speculative investment was not relevant to the company’s vision.
However, the company has not completely ruled out reintroducing crypto transactions on the online payments’ platform, Collision said:
“There have been a lot of developments of late with an eye to making cryptocurrencies better and, in particular, scalable and acceptable cost as a payment method.”
The Stripe executive quickly clarified that the company is yet to consider accepting crypto payments again but it is not implausible that the question will be explored.
After becoming the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments in 2014, Stripe announced that it will be winding down support for Bitcoin payments in 2018 stating that Bitcoin is better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. However, the company made it clear that it continues to support innovation in the space:
“We remain very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall. There are a lot of efforts that we view as promising and that we can certainly imagine enabling support for in the future.”
Collison also emphasised the importance of emerging projects like Solana on innovation in the digital asset space. Solana, a competitor to Ethereum is developing Layer 2 systems like bitcoin’s Lightning Network to improve transaction speed and reduce transaction cost.
Stripe recently formulated a team to explore opportunities in crypto and Web3, a collective term referring to the decentralised version for the internet.
