Stripe, one of the biggest and most popular online payments processors is now dropping Bitcoin because of the network’s slow confirmation time and high fees.
Stripe, which handles the payments transactions of Lyft, Target, Facebook and many more will not accept the “people’s currency” after April, 23rd, 2018. Stripe is known for ease and speed of payment, so the disadvantages that payment with Bitcoin has created is no longer viable for the fintech company.
The announcement came from their blog post today. The company commented on the change:
“Because of this, we’ve seen the desire from our customers to accept Bitcoin decrease. And of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.”
The idea of Bitcoin becoming more a store of value than a method of payment has made a series of companies, like Microsoft and Steam, drop it. Another weakness of Bitcoin is the great fluctuation in prices on an hourly basis. This means that by a transaction is paid with Bitcoin, the price of it is already wrong, because of the fast change in prices.
Stripe has always been bullish on ways to make digital payments more acceptable and popular among the public. Recode just reported:
“CEO Patrick Collison was certainly ahead of the curve on bitcoin’s rise. Collison told Recode back in 2014 that it was important for the payments platform to accept a currency that anyone around the world could access. Universality is the big one for me,” he said. “Bitcoin is something that anyone can get ahold of.”
Although the price of Bitcoin is still above $10,000, the numerous blows that the currency is taking from all sides starting from South Korea’s tax on digital currencies and the general “competition” to taper off the heat in the market has significantly cut the price of Bitcoin. Just two months ago, Bitcoin was reaching the $20,000 mark. Now, things look different.