Stripe is looking back at crypto

Stripe is a payment processing company that makes it easy and accessible for companies like Shopify, Pinterest and thousands more to receive payments from their customers. It processes hundreds of billions of dollars in e-commerce payments annually. The company says that 90% of American adults have used Stripe. Stripe was also the first major payment company to accept Bitcoin as payment currency back in 2014 and contributed to the Stellar Foundation.
While Stripe has started support cryptocurrency transactions in 2014, they suspended the feature in 2018. Yesterday, in a hiring post, they announced that they are now aggressively hiring engineers to build out a team to support cryptocurrencies as a payment mode once again.

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

According to the job posting, the new hires will lay the foundation to support and inform Stripe's crypto strategy. They will work on multiple aspects, including user interfaces for both web and mobile, as well as "backend, payments and identity systems." They will also be creating a short term and long term roadmap for the company. Guillaume Poncin, Stripe's former head of engineering for banking and financial products, will set up and run the team.

Why is this important? Stripe currently powers the checkout process for 1.96 Million merchants globally. Once its platform offers cryptocurrencies as a payment mode, Stripe could quickly empower millions of customers with the ability to pay for their favourite products using a cryptocurrency of their choice.

If you want to work with Stripe to build these features, you can check out the role here.