Fintech payment giant Stripe has partnered with FTX, FTX US, Blockchain.com, and Nifty Gateway to launch a crypto business suite. The launch will enable services that allow payments for non-fungible tokens and digital assets to be paid for with fiat currency.
The announcement was made by co-founder John Collision on Twitter on March 10th. By accepting fiat for crypto, Stripe hopes to attract a broader audience and make it easier than ever to invest in cryptocurrencies.
Businesses can now use Stripe’s application programming interfaces (APIs) to buy and store over 135 cryptocurrencies, trade NFTs, accept fiat payments for cryptocurrencies, and payout users in fiat. They will also be able to leverage Know Your Customer (KYC) solutions to utilize data to detect and block fraudulent transactions.
The company also announced it was dropping an NFT collection called “Cube Thingies” via NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway. The price per NFT ranges between $242.42 and $424.24 to mint. Proceeds from the collection will go to Watsi, a nonprofit healthcare organization.
A Return to Crypto for Stripe as Web3 Grows
This is not Stripe’s first foray into the crypto space. In 2014, the firm rolled out Bitcoin services but later reversed its decision in 2018, citing the network’s slow transaction speeds and high fees as being inefficient.
However, it did state it would re-enter the sector when crypto payments became more viable, and that now appears to be the case.
In October 2021, Cointelegraph reported that Stripe was building out a team to bring crypto payments to users and added crypto venture capitalist Matt Huang to its board of directors.
Now with the suite of crypto and NFT products, it appears the global payment giant is very serious about supporting Web3 companies, and that should come as no surprise. In 2021, the NFT market did over $25 billion in sales, and the metaverse market could hit $758 billion by 2026.
Stripe’s crypto services are currently only available in the U.S., the U.K., and the European Union. Its NFT services are supported in these regions as well as Japan. Considering the firm’s global reach of over three million users, its re-entry into the crypto market could threaten existing crypto payment processors.