Irish-American financial service provider Stripe will be using the Ethereum scaling platform Polygon to enable its customers make their payments to sellers, freelancers, content creators, and service providers in crypto.
Per CNBC, merchants would be allowed to make initial payouts using USDC stablecoins native to the Polygon’s network.
Notably, Twitter will be the first company to integrate the new payment method. Starting today [Friday], the social media platform will let a certain number of creators receive their earnings from its paid Ticketed Spaces and Super Follows features in USDC.
Four years back, in 2018, the payment-processing company had dropped its support for Bitcoin. Back then, it had stated that BTC’s volatile price swings made it inefficient for making everyday transactions. Since then, this is Stripe’s first significant push into crypto.
Last year, however, the company had formed a team dedicated to exploring crypto and Web3. While in November, Stripe co-founder John Collison hinted the firm might soon offer crypto support again.
Stripe’s Friday blogpost noted,
“While the ‘store of value’ aspects of cryptocurrencies typically receive the most attention, we view the prospect of ‘open-access global financial rails’ as being at least equally compelling. As a result, we’ve been exploring ways to use cryptocurrency-based platforms to unlock broader access.”
As highlighted above, the company’s crypto payouts feature will essentially run on the Polygon network. Time and again, other top-crypto networks have been criticized for their high fees and payment processing time. This L2 network, however, has been able to retain its “fast” and “cheap” tag, making it one of the go-to options.
Stripe said that it will add support for additional rails and payout currencies over time.
Polygon co-founder reacts to the integration
The protocol’s co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, took Twitter to congratulate and give credits to the entire Polygon family. He tweeted: