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Six years after dropping its support for cryptocurrency, Stripe Inc. is once again enabling its merchants to accept the digital money.
As of Oct. 9, Stripe merchants can now accept USD Coin, a stablecoin that settles transactions in U.S. dollars. In the first 24 hours after launch, consumers from more than 70 countries used the stablecoin to make a purchase, according to Stripe.
Stripe supports USD Coin on the Ethereum, Solana and Polygon blockchains and Pax Dollar on Ethereum and Solana. It reportedly charges merchants 1.5% of the amount in dollars per transaction.
Stripe originally began offering cryptocurrency as a payment option in 2014 with its support of Bitcoin, only to drop support for the digital currency in 2018 due to increasingly lengthy transaction times, high failure rates for transactions denominated in fiat currencies, large fluctuations in Bitcoin’s value, and higher fees, the company said at the time in a blog post.
Those issues led to decreased demand from merchants for support of cryptocurrency payments. As a result, Stripe concluded in 2018 that Bitcoin was becoming less useful for payments and “better-suited” to being an asset than a means of exchange.
“Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense,” the company said in 2018 in its blog post.
A year later, Stripe was reported to be part of the Facebook-backed Libra cryptocurrency project, only to announce it was pulling out of the project before it got off the ground.
In related news, cryptocurrency gateway Alchemy Pay said its Virtual Card service can now be integrated with the Samsung Pay wallet. The move comes on top of Alchemy Pay’s existing integration with the Google Pay wallet.
The addition, Samsung Pay’s latest news solidifies its commitment to offering “innovative financial tools for the crypto community,” the company says in a statement.
Looking ahead, Alchemy Pay says it plans to broaden its reach by supporting additional major digital payment platforms and offering integration with card networks such as Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.
