After refusing to offer Bitcoin support three years ago, U.S. fintech giant Stripe is looking to join the crypto industry bandwagon.
It can be recalled the $100-billion company pulled the plug on Bitcoin back in 2018, citing slow transaction times and rising fees as the major reasons for the decision.
Now, it appears that Stripe will try to enter the crypto sector as it aims to form a new blockchain team that will help it in enabling crypto payments for its users.
This move comes after some of Stripe’s major competitors such as Square, PayPal and MasterCard made their respective initiatives to enter the crypto space, with Square launching Bitcoin trading through its Cash App back in 2018. In October 2020, PayPal started offering crypto support for its U.S. customers.
Experienced players needed
A job listing placed on the fintech company’s website confirmed this new and surprising development.
Accordingly, Stripe is in need of four Staff Engineers that have experience in the crypto sector. On Twitter, Engineering Department Head Guillaume Poncin said he is looking for individuals (engineers and designers) to facilitate the building of “the future of Web 3 payments.”
The job description in the listing stated that the would-be engineers and designers will be responsible for everything — from the web or mobile User Interfaces (UIs) to identity systems, payments and backend.
Stripe and crypto growing together
Following Poncin’s Twitter post, Stripe co-founder John Collison chimed in, saying his company and crypto “have grown up at the same time.”
Collison explained that the fintech company made the decision to re-enter the crypto sector after it saw some “exciting developments in the space.”
He added that a year after the Bitcoin paper dropped, they already started writing the code and they have always kept an eye on things and discerned that the developments of the last few years in the space have been particularly “exciting.”
Image courtesy of Cointelegraph News/YouTube