Stripe Is Hiring a Crypto Team 3 Years After Ending Bitcoin Support
Stripe, a payments company, has started to build a crypto engineering team in order to chart its future with digital assets.
The team, which is described in LinkedIn posts as well as job listings, will be headed by Guillaume Poncin. This was Stripe’s former head for engineering for banking products and financial products. To help him plot Stripe’s cryptocurrency strategy, he is seeking to hire at most four people.
These engineers will ‘design and build the core components we need to support crypto use case’, according to job postings. Stripe’s new Crypto team is now.
Stripe’s modest hiring push (it currently has 4,000 employees), comes amid an increase in crypto payments integrations across online merchant and social media platforms. Strike, the crypto startup that created Twitter’s new bitcoin tipping function, is set to release its payments API. This will help mass adoption of crypto.
Although the team is new, Stripe has been interested in crypto for years. It is a payments giant that supports millions of digital storefronts. In 2014, Stripe made headlines when it enabled bitcoin support – an industry first. Four years later , Stripe discontinued this service.
However, a source confirmed to CoinDesk Stripe had never stopped supporting crypto. The company continued to monitor the development of digital assets and weigh whether or not to participate again. According to a source, the company has been showing increasing interest in NFTs (non-fungible tokens) over recent months.
Poncin sent the following tweets in response to CoinDesk’s questions:
According to a source, one thing is on the company’s mind: they want to avoid picking favorites. Stripe supports a variety of traditional online payment options. According to a source, Stripe wants to remain tech neutral when it comes crypto.
In early 2018, it was slightly more cautious. It ended Stripe’s bitcoin era by promising to possibly integrate Stellar which it seed-funded years before. The company’s announcement raised Stellar’s native cryptocurrency, XLM 20% in one day.
Stripe is well aware of the influence it has on online payments. According to Stripe, it processes hundreds billions of dollars annually in e-commerce; that 90% American adults have used it; and that its API (which still includes code to facilitate bitcoin transactions), is used hundreds of million times per day.
According to the job posting, ‘Many businesses trust and rely on Stripe’. This gives us an enormous opportunity to lead a new wave in innovation.