Stripe to stop working with Bitcoin

The statement coming from the Stripe team suggests that the reason they have decided to stop working with Bitcoin payments is due to the price growth the most popular cryptocurrency experienced over the last year and it’s still far higher than values during which Stripe decided to support Bitcoin payments in 2014.

However, the team might use an altcoin in the future once it get enough popularity:

“We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments. OmiseGO is an ambitious and clever proposal; more broadly, Ethereum continues to spawn many high-potential projects. We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low. Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future. And, of course, there’ll be more ideas and technologies in the years ahead.”

This fully matches the motivation of Steam (an online video game shop) to stop Bitcoin payments: the volatility of this cryptocurrency was explicitly mentioned as the reason of abandoning this payment type.

Microsoft online shop, in turn, recently decided to take similar measures with one notable difference: they simply paused Bitcoin payments, tweaked something in the mechanics and resumed them back in a relatively short period of time.