Stripe is seeking for four “Staff Engineers” with expertise in the crypto industry, according to a job ad page on the company’s website. It was announced on Twitter earlier today that Guillaume Poncin is seeking for engineers and designers to help “create the future of web3 payments.”
Future engineers and designers would be expected to work “across everything from web/mobile UIs to backend, payments and identification systems,” according to the description on LinkedIn. Users and developers alike are increasingly requesting better building blocks to take payments, transfer money, and swap fiat currency for cryptocurrencies. “Focusing on these issues and requirements allows us to create crypto-enabled services that are more reliable, quicker and of better quality.”
Stripe announced a new Web3 payments team and Coinbase announced an NFT product this morning.
Probably nothing.
— Chris Neumann (@ckneumann) October 12, 2021
“Stripe and cryptocurrency have risen at the same time,” Collison wrote in response to Poncin’s article, and he added that the company chose to enter the crypto sector after witnessing “interesting” advancements in the space: “We began developing code the year after Bitcoin’s whitepaper was published. When it comes to recent advancements (L2s, new chains, stablecoins, and DeFi), we’ve always remained focused on things (like Bitcoin support from 2013 to 2015).”
Stripe and crypto have grown up at the same time; we started writing code the year after the Bitcoin paper dropped. We’ve always kept an eye on things (e.g. bitcoin support 2013-2015) but last few years’ developments (L2s, new chains, stablecoins, DeFi) are particularly exciting. https://t.co/Jr1yyA37Wg
— John Collison (@collision) October 12, 2021
After big rivals like Square, Paypal, Mastercard, and Square have all joined the crypto industry, they’ve agreed to embrace cryptocurrency payments as well. In 2018, Square introduced BTC trading via its Cash App; in 2020, PayPal will provide cryptocurrency support to U.S. consumers; and in 2019, Mastercard stated that it will accept various cryptocurrencies on its ecosystem.
Stripe began taking Bitcoin (BTC) in 2014, but dropped it four years later because of the long transaction delays and high costs associated with the cryptocurrency. The Lightning Network and “high-potential” Ethereum blockchain ventures were mentioned in a Stripe blog post dated January 23rd, 2018, in which the company indicated that it may rejoin the industry if crypto payments are deemed “feasible”.
As recently as June, Collison indicated to Bloomberg TV that the company was looking into cryptocurrency once again, saying: “If you consider the type of society that crypto enthusiasts such as myself are working to create, I believe our objectives are very similar. Currently, only around one-fifth of all transactions take place across borders. Crypto is an interesting new way to attempt to address this problem” he went on to say.
Established in 2011, the digital payments business is now valued at about $100 billion. At a value of $95 billion, Stripe received $600 million in March 2021 in a financing deal, more than doubling its prior valuation of $35 billion from 2019. There are now 784,256 websites utilizing Stripe’s payment technology as per statistics from Built With.