Payments Giant Stripe Adds Crypto Again Starting With USDC, TechCrunch Reports

Fintech behemoth Stripe is going to allow customers to pay and receive cryptocurrency, starting with the stablecoin USDC.

According to TechCrunch, the company will begin by offering USDC solely on Solana and Ethereum.

Stripe co-founder and President John Collison declared today on X that “crypto is back” before describing how the new functionality would work. At a Stripe Sessions presentation, Collison went through the steps of sending 99 USDC through Solana’s Phantom wallet, showing how the transaction would get posted to the network instantly.

“And that’s how crypto is back at Stripe,” he said at the end of his presentation. The new functionality will begin operating in the Northern Hemisphere's summer months.

USDC is the second-largest stablecoin in the crypto industry. After bleeding out following its $55 billion June 2022 peak, it plummeted to a floor of $23 billion in November 2023 and has since taken off, reaching a $33 billion market cap, according to CoinGecko.

This wouldn’t be Stripe’s first foray into the cryptocurrency market. In April 2022, the firm introduced a feature allowing businesses to pay users in crypto using the Polygon network.

Stripe added Bitcoin in early 2014 but withdrew support for the token in 2018, citing concerns over its volatility.

Notably, the company had touted plans to add other cryptocurrencies over time as a response to a question about Terra’s now-defunct UST.

It might seem that the collapse of UST was behind the firm's decision to delay adding cryptocurrencies until now.