Stripe Adds Support for Crypto Businesses, Inks Partnership with FTX

San Francisco-headquartered financial services company Stripe Inc. recently launched services for crypto businesses, including exchanges, wallets, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Ledger Insights reports, March 11, 2022.

Stripe Launches Services for Crypto Businesses

The new crypto tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) unveiled by Stripe allow businesses to accept fiat deposits for crypto and payout to users in local currencies. In addition, Stripe offers KYC solutions and other fraud prevention tools to crypto companies.

Commenting on the development, John Collison, co-founder, and President of Stripe, said:

“Stripe now supports crypto businesses: exchanges, on-ramps, wallets, and NFT marketplaces. Not just pay-ins but payouts, KYC and identity verification, fraud prevention, and lots more.”

It must be recalled that in 2018, Striped disabled support for bitcoin (BTC) payments because of high transaction fees and price volatility at the time.

However, the company displayed a change of stance toward digital assets last year when it formed a crypto team and added Matt Huang, co-founder of Web3 investment company Paradigm, to its board of directors.

Stripe’s support for crypto businesses hardly comes as a surprise after the historic bull market the digital assets industry has witnessed in the last two years or so. Today, the total crypto market cap is well over $1.8 trillion while billions of dollars’ worth of digital assets are being traded on a daily basis across crypto exchanges and platforms the world over.

To put things into perspective, payments processor Visa processed $2.5 billion in crypto-related transactions in the last three months of 2021.

Stripe Partners with FTX

A part of Stripe’s foray into the crypto realm includes its recently-inked partnership with the leading cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its US-based subsidiary FTX US. The alliance aims to “build a seamless onboarding and identity verification flow for users joining the [cryptocurrency] exchange,” and support the ability for users to pay and manage crypto funds within their FTX accounts.

Commenting on the partnership, Tristan Yver, Head of Strategy at FTX, said:

“We want FTX to become a trusted mainstream brand. We’ve partnered with Stripe to help us transform what could be unintuitive crypto experiences into ones that exceed consumer expectations.”

Notably, FTX has already developed a new payments setup with Stripe in a few days. Yver noted:

“Stripe’s developer documents are a pleasant surprise compared to what we’ve worked with in the past.”

The official press release reads in part:

“FTX is also using Stripe Radar to mitigate fraud risk. Fully integrated with the rest of Stripe, Radar uses machine learning models and signals including customer details and billing information to distinguish fraudsters from legitimate customers. This enables FTX to accept as many legitimate transactions as possible, generating additional revenue with no extra effort.”

Yver added:

“The optimizations we made in our payments setup with Stripe deliver the smooth on-ramp experience FTX’s growing customer base demands. We’re able to multiply revenue by making it easier than ever for people to invest in crypto.”

In related news, crypto.news reported on March 7 that FTX was expanding its business footprint into the European market.