Stripe begins hiring a crypto team to “build the future of Web3 payments”, three years after ending bitcoin support
CoinDeskDanny Nelson
Context & Ripple Effects
Stripe’s return to crypto follows its earlier withdrawal of bitcoin support, which it attributed to volatility and slow transactions after having launched bitcoin payments years earlier. Hiring a dedicated team marks a shift from treating bitcoin as a checkout method to exploring a broader Web3-payments role.
Stripe must build crypto-specific product and operational capacity after several years without bitcoin support, making Web3 payments an explicit internal priority.
Web3 businesses gain a prospective mainstream payments partner, although the hiring announcement itself does not introduce a customer-facing product.
Second-order effects
The move positions Stripe to compete for payment flows from exchanges, wallets, and NFT marketplaces—a direction reflected in its later crypto-business support.
By bringing KYC, fraud, and compliance into its eventual on-ramp tooling, Stripe shifts more of the operational burden away from Web3 developers and toward the payments platform.
Third-order effects
Stripe’s arc points to crypto being integrated as embedded payments infrastructure rather than revived as a standalone bitcoin checkout option.
If other payment providers follow that model, compliance and conversion infrastructure may become a central point of competition for Web3 commerce, rather than token acceptance alone.
The trend: Payments platforms are moving from direct crypto acceptance toward managed, embedded infrastructure for Web3 businesses and fiat-to-crypto conversion.
We're starting a new crypto team at @Stripe. I'm hiring engineers and designers to build the future of Web3 payments: https://stripe.com/.... https://twitter.com/...
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.…
Exciting to see - every major fintech company is now doing something with crypto. Let that sink in for a moment. And most major social companies (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook). Gaming is next. Crypto is Web 3.0 https://twitter.com/...
Fintech firms moving into Web3 is, of course, inevitable and expected. But my question when it happens is always: will what you're building actually be available globally (as crypto is global by default), or will this just be piecemeal inclusion? https://twitter.com/...
The web3 concept that is slowly congealing is an interesting inversion of web 2.0. Back then the idea was “build social websites and figure out the money part later.” Today it's “build money stuff and figure out some non-speculative use for it later.” https://twitter.com/...
Stripe, like everyone else, will eventually chose to build on Lightning for payments. In the meantime, they continue to waste time pumping VC projects. https://twitter.com/...
so stoked about this!! Stripe is such a big deal cuz they managed to build an elegant embedded payment solution that can be integrated into marketplaces, SMB. etc., while latching onto old school payment networks on the back end https://twitter.com/...
.@stripe is the canonical example of how to build a developer-first business and a developer-friendly product. Now, they are focusing on serving the developers building Web 3.0 apps. This is signal, not noise. https://twitter.com/...
SCOOP: Payments company @stripe has begun assembling a crypto engineering team to chart its future in digital assets. @realDannyNelson reports https://www.coindesk.com/...
When @stripe ended Bitcoin support 3 years ago, it was because no one was using Bitcoin. That's obviously changed now, so it makes sense that Stripe would change too. https://twitter.com/...