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Fintech Startup Stripe Reaches $35 Billion Valuation

This article is contributed by our content partner, Nexchange group.

Who said fundraising was hard? Well, definitely not Stripe.

According to CNBC, San Francisco-based payments startup Stripe has just raised another $250 million in funding, bringing its valuation from $22.5 billion to $35 billion. Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz General Catalyst were among the investors that participated in the round. Previous investors include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Google’s venture arm, Capital G.

The cash injection will reportedly be used to help the company scale across the globe and develop new products. The startup, which co-founder John Collison says is “still very much in the early stage” of expansion, recently opened in eight other countries and launched two new products: a lending service called Stripe Capital and a corporate credit card named the Stripe Card.

Collison, when asked about the company’s IPO plans, said that Stripe has “no plans” to go public right away. He told CNBC that they’re “very happy as a private company,” adding that they’re “quite early in this opportunity.”

Image via Stephen McCarthy at RISE

Payment Firm Stripe Offers Positions by Hiring Engineers to Develop Crypto Strategy

Giant payment firm Stripe has started developing its crypto engineering team to design the future of its digital assets.

The head of engineering and cryptocurrency at Stripe, Guillaume Poncin, announced on Tuesday, October 12 that he is looking to hire at least four staff to help develop Stripe’s crypto strategy.

Poncin stated that he is building a team of engineers and designers to integrate cryptocurrency into their platform.

Poncin tweeted that: “We’re starting a new crypto team at @Stripe. I’m hiring engineers and designers to build the future of Web3 payments.”

According to the job posting on LinkedIn, Stripe is seeking to hire four new positions with the title “staff engineers, crypto.”

The job listing states, “We hear a growing need from developers and users in that space for better building blocks to accept payments, move funds, exchange between fiat and crypto. By focusing on these problems and needs, we aim to build faster, more trustworthy, and higher quality crypto-enabled experiences.”

The engineering team will “lay the foundation to support and inform Stripe’s crypto strategy” and will design and build the core components that the firm needs to support crypto use cases. The engineers are expected to identify and resolve long-term technical challenges, from user experience, API design, blockchain, data storage services, backend operations to payment and identity systems.

As per the job posting, the open positions are limited to engineers based in the U.S. who is required to have a background in developing the crypto space, including more than ten years of experience as an engineer.

Stripe is a giant payment firm with customers all over the globe already using the platform. The announcement could be another gateway to increased mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. The job listing further stated that “many businesses and users already rely on and trust in Stripe. This gives us a massive opportunity to be at the forefront of a new wave of innovation.”

The hiring announcement comes two years after Stripe CEO Patrick Collison stated he was sceptical of crypto assets.

Stripe initially began accepting Bitcoin in 2014, but the service was later halted in 2018 because of concerns associated with transaction confirmation times and fees on the main chain.

Since that time, the development of the Lightning Network has made Bitcoin a viable means of exchange without the long confirmation times and high fees.

Whales in The Crypto Markets

Stripe is set to become a new whale in the cryptocurrency market where clients come to purchase crypto tokens. The payment firm follows a rising number of traditional companies capitalizing on potential opportunities in the cryptocurrency market.

Several fintech firms are assisting in fueling demand for Bitcoin as they open the floodgates of millions of people to trade it and other crypto tokens.

For example, Square payment firm and PayPal launched crypto-related solutions that enable their clients to buy cryptocurrency supply entering the market each day. Visa and Mastercard have also been actively looking to capitalize on the rapidly growing industry.

The crypto space has been heating up amid more interest and increased focus on digital payments, partly driven by the Covid-19 pandemic and the rapid surge in eCommerce.

Stripe Could Resume Bitcoin Payments, after it Suspended the Service for 3 Years

Irish-American financial services and software as a service company, Stripe is likely to resume its Bitcoin payment services in the near future, a move the company halted back in 2018.

As revealed by the firm’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer John Collison at a CNBC hosted Dubai event, “Crypto obviously means a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” noting that the majority of the aspects of crypto that is being used as speculative investments are “not that relevant to what we do at Stripe.”

Collison said the likelihood could not be ruled out when asked whether the company will support Bitcoin payments ever again. “We don’t yet, but I think it’s not implausible that we would.” Collision acknowledged that;

“There have been a lot of developments of late with an eye to making cryptocurrencies better and, in particular, scalable and acceptable cost as a payment method.”

Several payment apps in the United States and around the world have switched to integrating Bitcoin payments over the past few years. Prominent examples of these include Paypal, Cash App, and brokerage platforms including Robinhood and eToro. While the challenges of volatility which made Stripe halt the service about three years ago is still inherent, the industry has notably grown more mature since that time.

Stripe has not sat on the sidelines thus far, the firm has hired a team of experts to help develop its crypto and “Web3,” approach respectively. Stripe is one of the most valuable fintechs in the world and is currently valued at about $95 billion, making it a prominent player in the payments ecosystem.

Collison is not oblivious to the innovative protocols in the space, singling out Solana and Bitcoin Lightning Network as one such platform to watch related to facilitating cheap and fast payment systems.

Stripe Resumes Crypto Service Offerings, Partners with FTX

Stripe, an Irish-American financial services company dual-headquartered in San Francisco, US and Dublin, Ireland, has jumped back into the cryptocurrency business after four years of attempting.

The global payments giant announced on Friday that it now offers support for crypto businesses and other services in the sector.

John Collison, Stripe co-founder, disclosed via Twitter social media platform that the firm “now supports all kinds of crypto businesses, including exchanges, on-ramps, wallets and NFT marketplaces, not just pay-ins but pay-outs, KYC and identity verification, fraud prevention, and lots more”.

As a result of the crypto offering services, Stripe announced that it has partnered with FTX, a global crypto exchange, to make cryptocurrency investments “easier than ever”.

Stripe stated that it would help FTX and its affiliate FTX US power payments for users adding funds to their FTX accounts. It will also assist FTX with related tasks like onboarding, verification of customers, and risk mitigation.

Stripe’s technology will assist FTX users in buying crypto assets with their debit cards and through automated clearing house transactions directly from their banks. Stripe will also help FTX with its payments technology to mitigate fraud risk by using machine learning to distinguish genuine customers from fraudsters.

Tristan Yver, head of strategy at FTX, talked about the partnership and said: “We’ve partnered with Stripe to help us transform what could be unintuitive crypto experiences into ones that exceed consumer expectations. The optimisations we made in our payments set-up with Stripe deliver the smooth on-ramp experience FTX’s growing customer base demands. We’re able to multiply revenue by making it easier than ever for people to invest in crypto.”

Enhancing Access to Diversified Financing Instruments

Stripe was an early proponent of cryptocurrency. In 2014, the global payments firm became the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments. However, in 2018, Stripe stopped supporting Bitcoin because of the cryptocurrency’s volatility and a lack of efficiency in making everyday transactions.

Last November, Stripe formed a small team committed to exploring crypto and “Web3.” The efforts are being led by Guillaume Poncin, Stripe’s head of engineering. Earlier that month, Stripe hired Matt Huang, co-founder of crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm, to its board of directors.

During that time, John Collison, Stripe co-founder, admitted that several innovations are emerging in digital assets that have potential, such as Solana blockchain, a competitor to Ethereum, as well as “Layer 2” systems like Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, which aim to speed up cryptocurrency transactions and process them at a lower cost.

Founded in 2009, Stripe has rapidly become the largest privately-held fintech company in the U.S. Last time, the firm had a valuation of $95 billion and counted the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, and Sequoia Capital as investors.

Stripe, which processes payments for the likes of Uber, Amazon, Google, and Amazon, has expanded into many areas in finance lately, including loans and tax management.

Stripe Launches USDC Payments via Polygon

Financial service institution Stripe announced last Friday that it will use Polygon, a decentralised Ethereum scaling network, to enable its customers to pay content creators, service providers, freelancers, and sellers in cryptocurrencies.

The Irish-American financial services with dual headquarters in San Francisco, US and Dublin, Ireland, said that it will start allowing initial payouts to be made using USDC stablecoins native to Polygon’s network and via Polygon-compatible wallets.

The famous financial services company stated that such payments would be accessible through its ‘Stripe Connect’ — its system for integrating payments into online marketplaces.

According to Stripe, Twitter will be the first company to integrate the new payment method to provide its merchants with the ability to make payouts in cryptocurrency through USDC stablecoin. Last Friday, the giant social media firm started allowing a select group of creators who use its products, like Ticketed Spaces and Super Follows, to receive their earnings in the stablecoin.

Stripe further mentioned that businesses and platforms using ‘Stripe Connect’ will be able to pay out in USDC without purchasing or holding the stablecoin itself.

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal talked about the development and said: “With crypto payouts, platforms using Stripe can instantly send money to verified recipients nearly anywhere in the world.”

Stripe stated that it plans to add support for additional cryptocurrencies and payout currencies over time.

More User-friendly to Access Crypto Worldwide

The latest development is Stripe’s efforts to expand its crypto offering services.

In March, Stripe reintroduced its crypto trading services after dropping the Bitcoin service in 2018. Initially, Stripe started supporting Bitcoin in 2014, but the firm has had a complicated relationship with the cryptocurrency over the years and eventually ended Bitcoin support in 2018.

Last month, Stripe relaunched its crypto payments support to give its clients an easier path to onboard web3 users and interact with crypto coins. The firm announced a suite of products intended to provide customers access to tools and APIs that make it easier for clients to purchase and hold crypto assets, cash out, trade NFTs, and handle compliance workflows such as Know Your Customer (KYC). Stripe’s products aim to enable support for users to buy more than 135 crypto coins with fiat currencies in 180 countries.