Stripe Payment Processor To Terminate Bitcoin Support
Bitcoin seems to be taking hits from all sides and the recent announcement does not seem to be making things any easier. A mobile payment processing service called Stripe has announced that it plans to stop supporting Bitcoin payments.
Stripe is the latest among numerous payment services to consider Bitcoin as problematic in making payments. The mobile payment processing service claims that people have been using the cryptocurrency as a store of value or as an asset rather than using it as an exchange of value that can be used to make payments. The company also claims that the number of cryptocurrency merchants that accept payment through Bitcoin has been dwindling.
Stripe also announced that it plans to gradually stop supporting Bitcoin over the next three months. It is thus encouraging its clients to stop using Bitcoin payments since it will not be supported in the future. The payment processing platform which is currently valued at $9 billion initially integrated Bitcoin in 2015. This made it possible for vendors to accept Bitcoin payments via the platform and this was viewed as a move aimed at making Bitcoin one of the mainstream payment methods. Unfortunately, Bitcoin has also been receiving a lot of backlash because of the slow nature of its transactions and high transaction fees.
A Stripe blog post reads: “Our hope was 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.”
Unfortunately, it seems that the payment processor’s hopes are far from becoming a reality especially considering the prevailing direction of the cryptocurrency and the problems that it has been associated with. Cryptocurrencies are increasingly becoming more popular and this has encouraged more people to get involved. As a result, cryptocurrencies have been growing at a rapid pace.
The fast-changing cryptocurrencies especially Bitcoin have become quite problematic. Tom Karlo, the product manager for Stripe explained in his blog that transactions often end up resulting in wrong amounts because of the drastic price fluctuations. He also stated that customers on the payment processing service have been demanding less of Bitcoin payments due to the high transaction fees involved in Bitcoin transactions. The company plans to stop supporting Bitcoin transactions completely by April 23RD. Karlo also revealed that the company will shift its attention to other cryptocurrencies that offer faster and payments and low transaction fees.