Four years after ending its Bitcoin payments option in 2018, partly due to reasons of market volatility, payments giant Stripe has re-entered crypto.

Perhaps the US$95 billion, privately-owned, Irish-American firm has been kicking itself for getting out at that time, after the crypto industry and market exploded in growth over the past couple of years.

Whatever the case, it’s back and in a much bigger way than before. The company’s co-founder, John Collison, wrote in a tweet that “Stripe now supports crypto business: exchanges, on-ramps, wallets, and NFT marketplaces. Not just pay-ins but payouts, KYC and identity verification, fraud prevention, and lots more.”

Stripe’s return to crypto comes after it revealed in October last year that it was hiring a crypto engineering team to develop Web3 payment services.

And according to its website, the payments firm will now be facilitating crypto exchanges and onramps, allowing users in more than 180 countries to deposit funds and use its Connect product to pay out fiat currencies. “Stripe Identity”, meanwhile will be used to verify identities of users in more than 33 countries.

Currently, Stripe’s crypto services aren’t available in Australia, but cater to businesses in the US, UK and the European Union, while its NFT services for marketplaces are supported in those regions as well as Japan.

Additionally, the payments firm has launched its own NFT collection called Cube Thingies as a part of the announcement, with proceeds going to San Francisco-based healthcare crowdsourcing nonprofit Watsi.

 

Stripe and FTX team up

Stripe has also just announced it’s partnering with the global crypto exchange FTX and its American-based division FTX.US to help facilitate its crypto services and build onboarding and identify-verification features.

According to a statement, the goal is to make the process of opening and funding FTX accounts a more seamless experience for users. FTX will be utilising “Stripe Radar” – a machine-learning based application that aims to lessen fraud risk.

“We want FTX to become a trusted mainstream brand,” said Tristan Yver, Head of Strategy at FTX. “We’ve partnered with Stripe to help us transform what could be unintuitive crypto experiences into ones that exceed consumer expectations.”