Bad news for all the operators who use Stripe to send payments: the company has announced last Tuesday that it will put an end to bitcoin support as a payment method used by its processes.

The product manager Tom Karlo wrote in a post on the official blog that Stripe would abandon bitcoin in the next three months, then putting a complete end to support for the biggest cryptocurrency in the world on April 23rd 2018.

We remember how Stripe activated the bitcoin transactions in 2015, a move that has come a year after the first technology test. Since then, residents of more than 60 different countries could pay traders on Stripe using bitcoin.

However, the long transaction times, the increase in transaction failure rates and rising rates have led Stripe to believe that the bitcoin itself is becoming less and less popular among merchants and users of its platform.

However, even if Stripe will no longer accept bitcoin payments, the company said it was “very optimistic about cryptocurrencies in general,” with Karlo who then said he felt support for other currencies could be implemented on a date future.

The issue of high commissions on bitcoin transactions has been cited by the gaming service company Steam, which announced early in December that it would stop providing bitcoin payments support. On that occasion, a spokesman for the company said that the high tariffs “cause even greater problems when the value of bitcoins drops dramatically”.

At Stripe, however, Karlo preferred to leave the door open to enable payments in other cryptocurrencies, such as Stellar. “We could add support for Stellar (to which we provided initial funding) if the substantial use continues to grow” – he said.