When it decided to accept bitcoin for payments four years ago, Stripe said that it was the first major online payments platform to accept bitcoin. It added support for the digital currency so that merchants who use Stripe could accept bitcoin for payments. However, Sprite has now announced that it’s going to end bitcoin support this April.
The company said that it hoped for Bitcoin to become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions that would help its customers make purchases where credit card penetration was less or in use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.
As block size limits have been reached over the past year, Bitcoin has evolved to become more of an asset as opposed to a means of exchange. This means that Bitcoin has become less useful for payments and with transaction confirmation times rising, it has resulted in an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies.
It’s common then, that by the time a transaction is confirmed, the volatility in bitcoin price means that the confirmation is for an amount that’s technically wrong. That’s not all. Fees associated with bitcoin transactions have risen to tens of U.S. dollars which makes them about as expensive as bank wires.
Stripe says that all of this has caused the desire of its merchants to accept bitcoin decrease. Businesses that are accepting bitcoin on Stripe have seen their revenues from bitcoin decline substantially. This is why Stripe has decided to wind down support for bitcoin payments and it’s going to work with merchants to ensure a smooth transition before it completely stops processing bitcoin transactions on April 23rd, 2018.