Stripe To Hire New Crypto Team Three Years After Abandoning Bitcoin Services

Payments processor Stripe is looking to add four engineers to its new crypto team as it builds out a strategy for digital assets.

What Happened: According to job listings on Stripe’s website, the company is looking for engineers with technical experience in the crypto space to lay the foundation for its crypto strategy.

We’re starting a new crypto team at @Stripe. I’m hiring engineers and designers to build the future of Web3 payments: https://t.co/A40QPCw3XG. pic.twitter.com/ygYTrA125T

— Guillaume Poncin (@gponcin) October 12, 2021

Stripe was one of the first companies in the world to support Bitcoin BTC/USD, accepting the digital asset as early as 2014. However, the payments company ended that support in 2018 citing long transaction confirmation times and expensive fees on the network that made Bitcoin “less useful for payments.”

Now, the company’s return to the crypto space follows moves by large players in the payments sectors such as PayPal Holdings Inc PYPL, Visa Inc V and Mastercard Inc MA to build out crypto infrastructure.

“Stripe and crypto have grown up at the same time; we started writing code the year after the Bitcoin paper dropped. We’ve always kept an eye on things (e.g. bitcoin support 2013-2015) but last few years’ developments (L2s, new chains, stablecoins, DeFi) are particularly exciting,” stated Stripe co-founder John Collison.

Coinbase Global Inc COIN CEO Brian Armstrong also weighed in on Stripe’s return to crypto, saying it was “exciting to see” that every major fintech company is now involved in the space.

Armstrong also noted that most major social network companies, like Reddit, Twitter Inc TWTR, and Facebook Inc FB are also doing something with crypto.

“Gaming is next. Crypto is Web 3.0,” he said.

BTC Price Action: At press time, Bitcoin was trading at $55,912.90, down 0.68% over 24 hours.

Photo by Michael Förtsch via Unsplash