As Bitcoin continues to become less useful for payments given increasing confirmation times and processing costs (tens of dollars per transaction), Stripe has decided to discontinue BTC payments by April 23, 2018. The payment processing company remains bullish on cyrpto overall and will continue to look at other alternatives such as Ethereum, Stellar, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin.
At Stripe, we’ve long been excited about the possibilities of cryptocurrencies and the experimentation and innovation that’s come with them. In 2014, we became the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments. 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. Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions that have been made along the way. (And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, ambitious project do so well.)
