Online Payments Company Stripe To Allow Bitcoin Payments

Online Payments Company Stripe To Allow Bitcoin Payments

Stripe, an online payments company will be allowing merchants who use its payment systems to accept Bitcoin payments. The CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison, told this to Re/code on Wednesday night. In accordance to Stripe, this move will make it the first largest payments platform to allow Bitcoin payments.

How will Stripe Allow Bitcoin Payments?

Until this moment, if Stripe customers wished to accept Bitcoin as payment, they had to process this through either Coinbase or Bitpay. However, Stripe will be using an alternative method. Stripe will allow for Bitcoin payments through a private beta program, which the customers will be able to sign up for. Tarsnap is the very first online backup service in Stripe to use Bitcoin as payment.

Patrick Collison, the CEO and co-founder of Stripe said that the move of allowing the integration of Bitcoin as payments was done in order to increase the activity for the company. Collison said,

“We acknowledge that bitcoin is important today … it may or may not be important in five years. No matter what happens, multiple payment instruments will be important.”

This is certainly a valid point; however, from this it is obvious that Bitcoin is being used here for only Stripe’s benefit. In addition to allowing Bitcoin payments, Stripe is also working on making a support for ACH which will allow businesses to receive payments from a customer’s bank account automatically.

Why Accept Bitcoin Payment

Collison told Re/code that Stripe had a “positive disposition to bitcoin” because the digital currency is solving “the problems we care about.” He further said,

“Universality is the big one for me. Bitcoin is something that anyone can get a hold of.”

The merchants who wish to implement Bitcoin payments in Stripe will be paid in the currency of their choosing. The merchants can set the price of their item in a local currency and Stripe will be able to calculate the cost in Bitcoin automatically.

The payment will arrive in the merchants’ bank accounts in seven days or less. In order to counteract the volatility of Bitcoin, Stripe nor its customers will hold onto Bitcoin. According to Collison, the company has not decided what to charge for Bitcoin transactions, but this will be decided on before the beta program is completed.

Besides Stripe, a smaller online payments processor named Balanced has also launched a similar effort by accepting Bitcoin through Coinbase. Allowing the integration of Bitcoin in online payments systems will allow a wider audience for the digital currency.

Image via Stripe