NEWS Payment Processor Stripe Ends Support for Bitcoin, Hypes Altcoins

[mayuri27]

Stripe, the mobile payment processor with a $9 bln valuation, has announced that it is officially winding down its Bitcoin integration. Over the next three months, Stripe customers will be encouraged to migrate away from Bitcoin payments. After that, Bitcoin will no longer be accepted at all.

Stripe made waves in 2015 when it fully integrated Bitcoin, allowing all vendors who use the platform to accept Bitcoin payments. Many saw this as a sign of impending mainstream acceptance of Bitcoin as a payment method, but high fees and slow transaction confirmations have hobbled the network.

Disappointment
In a blog post, Stripe noted the high hopes the company had for Bitcoin when it first integrated the currency into its platform:

“Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.”

Stripe cites slow confirmation times and high fees as the reason for its abandonment of Bitcoin as a payment method:

“This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.”

Bitcoin as an asset
Stripe remains optimistic about cryptocurrency as a whole, but the company sees Bitcoin as more of an asset than a payment network.