Major online payment platform, Stripe, has announced that it has ended support for Bitcoin processing. According to a statement on the company’s official blog, Bitcoin transactions stopped on April 23, 2018.

However, the company has expressed its confidence in cryptocurrencies in general. The statement reads:

“We remain very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall. There are a lot of efforts that we view as promising and that we can certainly imagine enabling support for in the future.”

Reason

In 2014, Stripe became one of the first major payment companies to support Bitcoin payment as they wanted to quickly get into the crypto market and immerse themselves in all the possibilities and innovations cryptocurrencies offer.

However, the company believes now that because block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin is now more useful as an asset and less useful as a means of payment or exchange.

Also, the time required to confirm transactions have risen so much that it has now greatly decreased the successful completion of some of these transactions denominated in fiat currencies. This also means that fees have also substantially been increased, charging tens of dollars in some cases.

Effects

Consequently, people have become very wary of Bitcoin payments and are no longer very interested in accepting them. The businesses who still received Bitcoin payments have had their income decrease incredibly.