Stripe Is Hiring a Crypto Team 3 Years After Ending Bitcoin Support

The cryptocurrency space looks a lot different than it did 3 years ago... I hope they focus on supporting stablecoins. All the benefits of cryptocurrency (censorship resistance, etc) without having to hold on to a volatile asset.

They should've stuck with Stellar, for any realistic money transferring between people (merchants, p2p, cross-border), Stellar is one of the best options as the fees are insanely low compared to any other large cryptocurrencies.

I&#x27;ve been seeing two sides of this:<p>- Our own payments: Some remote contractors ask to be paid in crypto: haven&#x27;t figured out clean way how wrt rest of our back-office SaaS stack, so not yet. To a much more negligible extent, our online customers want to pay that way: we do get a lot of proton etc. email users, so I can imagine more of this in the future, esp. as we add more privacy features. I bet other startups are seeing the same!<p>- Our power users: Crypto product &amp; investigation teams often want to embed&#x2F;use our GPU graph viz tech, and our inquiries have grown up from early VC&#x2F;ICO-dependent startups to ones with $B+ assets under management. At this rate, seems like only a matter of 1-2 years for banks and big consulting co&#x27;s for the same thing. So a big yet modern payment processor like Stripe seems quite sensible right now! (And I think Square was trying on and off for awhile as well.)

It&#x27;s just FOMO, i think, since PayPal did something similar.<p>No doubt they had an analysis about it. But the potential cost of being wrong is much bigger than financing 5 employees.

If you&#x27;re in the payments business in 2021 and don&#x27;t have crypto product offerings then you are limiting your customer base. Imo a good decision for stripe, and even better to let others chart the course for a few years first.

I had a stripe account terminated for violating their terms (spoiler alert, I hadn&#x27;t) but any crypto offering by them will be subject to the same terms.<p>It&#x27;s absolutely toxic that companies like this think they can move into the crypto space, it was set up explicitly to get away from companies like this.

The use of the word &quot;crypto&quot; to mean &quot;cryptocurrency&quot; in this article is irritating because in the context of tech, &quot;crypto&quot; can also mean &quot;cryptography&quot; and I&#x27;m pretty sure Stripe already has lots of cryptography specialists on staff.<p>Or maybe Stripe is hiring a team of cryptozoologists?