$9 billion startup Stripe drops bitcoin support because it doesn't make sense as a means of payment

pulse

January 23, 2018 8:42 PM

The $9 billion payments company's exit comes at a time of mass concern over the cost of using bitcoin for online retail.

Stripe, the $9 billion online payments company, is putting an end to the product that enabled retailers to accept bitcoin as payment.
It's a major hit to the popular cryptocurrency, once believed to be the future of online payments, but Stripe isn't the only company to back off.
Expensive transaction fees and long wait times have made it difficult to use bitcoin for small transactions, since mining fees spiked at $37 per purchase in December.

The $9 billion digital payments company Stripe is killing off its bitcoin product, the company announced Tuesday.

Citing a decrease in use by both retailers and customers, Stripe said will wind down support for its bitcoin payment application and stop processing bitcoin payments entirely on

Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense," Stripe product manager Tom Karlo wrote in the announcement.

The online video game storefront Valve stopped accepting bitcoins in December, and Microsoft briefly disabled bitcoin payments around the same time. Both companies handled bitcoin payments through BitPay, a bitcoin-specific payment application and Stripe competitor, which itself temporarily banned payments under $100 because of the large fees associated with transaction.

While Karlo wrote in the blog that Stripe remains "

"Ourhopewas that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive," Karlo wrote in the blog entry.

That hope, it turns out, was misplaced.

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