tl;dr Summary: International payment company Stripe announced that they now support crypto businesses such as exchanges, on-ramps, wallets, and NFT marketplaces, with multiple services available. They’ve partnered with some companies already established in the crypto space to help achieve this.
Stripe is one of the most successful and widely adopted web2 companies of their era. Their application programming interfaces (APIs for short) have allowed business owners all over the world to be able to quickly and easily set up the infrastructure to accept payments.
This fintech powerhouse announced on March 11th that businesses can use Stripe’s new API to accept crypto, provide digital wallets, payout users in fiat, track identity with KYC solutions, and even go so far as to protect against fraudulent transactions.
This is massive news for crypto adoption becoming more and more mainstream as Paypal and Stripe are two of the quickest and easiest payment platforms merchants use to accept payment.
Stripe co-founder John Collison posted this tweet to break the news:
It has been noted that they have already partnered with massive players in the crypto space including Blockchain.com, FTX, Nifty Gateway, and more.
Looking back, this has been in the works for quite some time. They had initially dabbled in supporting crypto as far back as 2014 when they released support for Bitcoin before removing it due to its slow transaction speed and fees.
While this all comes as great news to users and business owners looking to implement support for crypto-based payments, I imagine this curtails the plans for the many web3 start-ups that were trying to be the “Stripe of Crypto.”
So what can someone who’s looking to implement stripe for crypto actually do?
Stripe says, “Our payments platform is designed to increase conversion and reduce fraud at every step of the payment flow. Get access to streamlined checkout flows, fraud prevention, issuer-level optimizations, and more so that you can focus on building the next big thing.”
Here are some of the featured rollouts:
- Crypto exchanges and on-ramps
Allow users to deposit funds via local payment methods and payout fiat currencies in 45+ countries. - Wallets
Leverage their banking-as-a-service APIs. Their Treasury product allows you to embed financial services in your marketplace or platform. With a single integration, enable your customers to hold funds, pay bills, earn yield, and manage cash flow. On the flip side, their issuing product allows you to create, manage, and distribute virtual and physical cards. - NFT marketplaces
Allows you to create marketplaces, onboard buyers and sellers within seconds for things like art, in-game valuables, and membership tokens. Use their Identity product to programmatically verify the authenticity of ID documents for over 33 different countries. This helps reduce fraud and prevent attacks while keeping friction low for legitimate customers.
The nicest part of all of this is the ability for companies to launch projects quickly, fulfill regulatory requirements, and be able to keep all of their data secure. Stripe has built a reputation for its performance over the last era of the internet, so there’s a level of comfort in using them to navigate this new landscape.
Currently, it seems they are taking a selective approach to help their users get started in crypto. I reached out to learn more and they had a dedicated team member ask me questions so they could help identify the right products to potentially implement based on my use case.
More specifically, they asked me these questions so they could connect me with the right person on their end to guide me through implementation:
- What is the fund flow you’re looking to accomplish with Stripe Crypto?
- I took a look at your website and understand the nature of your business to a degree. Please expand on the products/services that your business offers.
- Are you currently managing fiat payments? How much fiat volume are you processing on an annual basis?
- If you do not currently have fiat payment rails, how much volume would you expect to process through Stripe in the first year of live activity? A loose projection is fine.
- When are you looking to go-live with a Stripe solution?
With powerful additions like Stripe to the crypto ecosystem, mass adoption seems to be inching closer and closer!
