Stripe Is Hiring a Crypto Team 3 Years After Ending Bitcoin Support (coindesk.com) 5
Payments company Stripe has begun assembling a crypto engineering team to chart its future in digital assets. CoinDesk reports: The team -- described in LinkedIn posts and job listings -- will be run by Guillaume Poncin, Stripe's former head of engineering for banking and financial products. He is looking to hire at least four staffers to help plot Stripe's crypto strategy. Those engineers "will design and build the core components that we need to support crypto use cases," the job posts said. "Crypto is a brand new team at Stripe."
The team may be new but Stripe's interest in crypto stretches back years. A payments giant whose API supports millions of digital storefronts, it made headlines in 2014 when it supported bitcoin -- an industry first. Stripe abandoned that service four years later. But a source told CoinDesk that Stripe never left crypto. The company continued to watch the digital assets space develop, weighing if and how to participate again. In recent months it has shown increasing interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the source said. One thing on the company's mind is a need to avoid picking favorites, the source said. Stripe already supports an array of more traditional online payment options. It wants to remain tech-neutral when it comes to crypto, the source said.
The team may be new but Stripe's interest in crypto stretches back years. A payments giant whose API supports millions of digital storefronts, it made headlines in 2014 when it supported bitcoin -- an industry first. Stripe abandoned that service four years later. But a source told CoinDesk that Stripe never left crypto. The company continued to watch the digital assets space develop, weighing if and how to participate again. In recent months it has shown increasing interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the source said. One thing on the company's mind is a need to avoid picking favorites, the source said. Stripe already supports an array of more traditional online payment options. It wants to remain tech-neutral when it comes to crypto, the source said.
Cryptography is a great field (Score:2)
That's great that they're hiring more cryptographers! Cryptography is a very important field for data security, and it's tough to find good cryptographers.
What's that you say? Oh, they're hiring a cryptocurrency team? Get off my lawn!
They're scared (Score:2)
They see how easily Strike (note the K) has onboarded Twitter and El Salvador onto the lightning network and they're afraid to become obsolete.
This is more about lightning than Bitcoin.