Stripe to start taking crypto payments starting with USDC stablecoin

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/25/after-6-year-hiatus-stripe-to-start-taking-crypto-payments-starting-with-usdc-stablecoin/

by rvz • 2 years ago

51 47 2 years ago

techcrunch.com

namanyayg• 2 years ago

They're supporting Solana which is basically a centralized coin with a superminority of 22 validators [0] and keeps going offline regularly [1].

They fail to support legitimate businesses and instead choose to support crypto, which is a world of grift and scams.

Has Stripe sold their ethics?

[0] https://solanabeach.io/validators [1] https://decrypt.co/216132/solana-outage-developers-say-could...

hanniabu5• 2 years ago

It is a damn shame to see Solana getting integrations and put on the same playing field as Ethereum, since as you say it's quite centralized and was a product of Sam Bankman-Fried's fraud pumping it into "relevancy".

But unfortunately those behind the projects and the project's treasury itself has become quite rich from the increase in price and can support bizdev and grants (bribes).

nailer4• 2 years ago

But unfortunately those behind the projects and the project's treasury itself has become quite rich from the increase in price and can support bizdev and grants (bribes).

I don’t think Stripe chose to demo Solana because of a grant.

spxneo3• 2 years ago

If the fish rots from the head then this "ny state of mind" doesn't begin with Stripe if you understand who I'm talking about.

Its incredible that the harm that SBF has done with Solana and other ponzi coins would get direct support from Stripe

J_Shelby_J3• 2 years ago

IMO, the old generation of crypto people will go to their grave mad that anything other than ethereum sees success.

There are valid complaints about Solana, but the ones that get trotted out in online discourse are repeated until they become reality for the horse beater. Unfortunately for them, their reality is disconnected from actual reality.

pedalpete3• 2 years ago

I consider myself old generation, but definitely don't have this perspective. I wonder if Ethereum is the AOL of crypto.

arisAlexis3• 2 years ago

But it does go down very often and requires "engineers" to bring it up. That's not a decentralized Blockchain at all. Why pretend it to be?

null0pointer• 2 years ago

Don't worry, they fail to support legitimate crypto too. Legitimate cryptos being XMR, BTC, BCH, and ETH, predominantly.

k_vi3• 2 years ago

This is no different from ETH, Lido staking has ~30% market share[0].

Stake centralizing != less security. no amount of stake can allow validators to steal your funds, this affects only censorship resistance. So actual validator count is more important than superminority.

In case of USDC I'm assuming Circle should be running their own validator, which is the source of truth.

As someone who has used most networks, Solana has the best experience for transacting USDC.

[0] https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking

harles• 2 years ago

How long do these payments take? Or are they layering a centralized system on top to pretend the crypto has moved?

hanniabu5• 2 years ago

Depends on the chain.

Bitcoin, which is unfortunately many people's first introduction to crypto, takes on average 10 minutes per block. Typically services then wait for finality which is 6 blocks, so about an hour.

On Ethereum, each block is 12 seconds and 64 blocks for finality, so 12.8 minutes. If Stripe were smart, they'd be using an L2 like Base where block times are ~2s.

On Solana, each block .45s and 20-40s for finality. But Solana makes a lot of sacrifices and tradeoffs to achieve this and thus isn't on the same level as Ethereum.

Edit: From another article is appears they'll be using custody funds though, at least to start. So in that case transactions should be instant due to a centralized layer as you mention.

J_Shelby_J3• 2 years ago

What sacrifices and trade offs does it make that an L2 with equivalent performance doesn’t also make?

kevincox• 2 years ago

finality which is 6 blocks

There isn't such thing as "finality" in bitcoin right? The probability of another chain growing longer just dramatically shrinks each extra block mined (as most of the mining power will quickly shift to the longest known chain).

There is also a lot of historical data as the bitcoin blockchain has been running for many years. How many times has a chain with a 2-block lead been surpassed? It seems like the data is out there to create a pretty accurate graph for by-chance reversal for a given number of confirmations. (Intentional reversing is a bit of a different issue but you should be able to estimate the computation costs as well).

J_Shelby_J3• 2 years ago

I used Solana pay irl last year, and it was as easy and quick as Apple Pay. Solana has a sub-second confirmation time.

If you live in a county with a functional and stable financial system then this announcement isn’t for you. If you live in xyz country where getting a credit card is a big challenge this will make it easier to shop online.

arisAlexis3• 2 years ago

Solana frequently goes down and I compare it to a centralized record.keeping db like PayPal so I'm not sure what the benefit is here

colesantiago• 2 years ago

It is a massive disappointment that Stripe is getting involved in facilitating scams and ransomware by accepting ‘crypto payments’.

I think it’s about time to move off Stripe to other payment providers that don’t accept crypto since Stripe is becoming more hostile and banning customers and shutting down their accounts for no reason.

I am betting that Stripe chose crypto to avoid more chargebacks (that crypto does not support)

spxneo3• 2 years ago

I am quite taken back by Stripes decision here but dissing PG's golden boy will get me banned so I suggest everybody to read @bitfinexed on X on why USDC/Tether is extremely shady.

but I don't know which payment processor like Stripe can do the following:

- marketplace onboarding for buyers and sellers

- crowdfunding

- mass payouts/intermediary payouts

- doesn't hide fees for dashboard

nailer4• 2 years ago

Tether is USDT not USDC. Different organisations with different degrees of capitalisation and different degrees of transparency.

hanniabu5• 2 years ago

since Stripe is becoming more hostile and banning customers and shutting down their accounts for no reason

Start using Ethereum, it prevents this. Stop using intermediaries. The solution is right in front of you, but you're too distracted by the scams to see what the technology enables.

Yes it's unfortunate that so many scams exist and give the entire ecosystem a bad name, but scammers exist everywhere. Is email a scam because of scammers? Are phones a scam because of scammers? Is the stock exchange a scam because of scammers? No, and this is no different.

MuffinFlavored• 2 years ago

Stop using intermediaries.

How do you get people with fiat to pay you in USDT/USDC?

yfw• 2 years ago

They used to take btc before

bdcravens• 2 years ago

2014 (and ended 3 years later) I actually received a Stripe t-shirt for finding a "bug" with the console (was showing "Test" even though the transactions were live on the blockchain)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792124

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

Two HN unicorns involved then. Although USDC is emitted by "Centre", Centre is 50/50 Coinbase and Circle. And Coinbase is another HN unicorn.

pedalpete3• 2 years ago

I wasn't familiar with circle, but apparently they create USDC https://www.circle.com/en/

thecleaner• 2 years ago

Is Stripe profitable ?

steve_adams_86• 2 years ago

Apparently they weren't for a long time, but they may have been last year (based on some cursory googling). They projected $100,000,000 EBITDA for 2023, but I'm not certain it panned out.

Their cash burn over the years has been astonishing. It seems like a very difficult business to make money in, somewhat ironically. Sort of a "water water everywhere" situation.

toomuchtodo3• 2 years ago

Can’t your bank just accept FedNow instant payments? You don’t need Stripe and stablecoins for them to do that. 20 second SLA, $100k value transfer at a time (to start, up to $500k based on specific institution risk profile), and they are free or very low cost.

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/organi...

https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/fednow-launch

https://www.moderntreasury.com/questions/what-is-the-maximum...

inhumantsar2• 2 years ago

fednow is great and long overdue but how many of stripe's customers and their customers' customers are able to get US bank accounts?

Forex fees on credit cards tend to be painful outside of the US and wires aren't a viable option for most businesses.

toomuchtodo3• 2 years ago

How much of Stripe’s volume is cross border payments? It's a big TAM [1], but also one central banks are coming for [2]. It's not a business, it's a utility pushing ISO 20022 messages around a bus [3].

[1] https://stripe.com/resources/more/cross-border-payments-expl...

[2] https://www.bis.org/publ/othp62.htm

[3] https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d215.pdf

tail_exchange2• 2 years ago

Stripe does way more than just taking USD payments. If that's all you need, then sure, but let's not pretend they are are interchangeable.

toomuchtodo3• 2 years ago

Agreed, but lets not pretend their value add for these trimmings justifies them consuming the entire value transfer TAM as their valuation argument.

brcmthrowaway• 2 years ago

I thought stablecoins were a scam?

pedalpete3• 2 years ago

Stablecoins provide all the risks of crypto, with none of the rewards.

They aren't inherently a scam, but that doesn't mean that they can't be part of a scam.

Luna had a "stablecoin" but that turned out to be a scam, but that doesn't mean all stablecoins are scams.

inhumantsar2• 2 years ago

Terra's stablecoin wasn't so much a scam as it was built on a house of cards. They backed it with their own coin and a dynamic mint/burn algorithm, basing it all on the assumption that they'd never have that kind of crisis. In the end tho they did and it became a feedback loop.

Circle's treasury is (iirc) 1:1 with USD and T-Bills. If those fail the way Luna did then there are bigger things to worry about.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

At best they are like PayPal... So pretty bad.

jdminhbg• 2 years ago

There are two different kinds of stablecoins. One is algorithmic stablecoins, which you probably remember from the Terra/Luna collapse. It relies on issuing/redeeming one cryptocurrency for another to keep the peg, which works mathematically unless the divisor goes to zero, which is what happened.

USDC is just a one-to-one stablecoin where for every coin issued there is one redeemable US dollar somewhere. People have accused Tether, which works on the same principle, of being a scam by not actually having a dollar for every USDT, but there's nothing inherently scammy or non-scammy about the system. It's like a bank, either they have the reserves they claim or they're committing fraud.

imtringued2• 2 years ago

What motivation is there for stripe to accept cryptocurrency payments? It feels like someone is pushing for it without there actually being enough consumer demand for a large company to bother with this.

Also, one problem with USDC is that there is not a single "USDC", every Blockchain has its own independent version of USDC. So advertising "USDC" is kind of meaningless, because you have to support Ethereum USDC, Solana USDC and so on.

k_vi3• 2 years ago

what is the right demand when stripe should be supporting?

Currently there are 93M wallets holding stablecoins with a weekly transfer of 373B[0].

[0] https://app.rwa.xyz/stablecoins

Stripe to start taking crypto payments starting with USDC stablecoin

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