After a year of sending the flagship cryptocurrency a letter, the Silicon Valley fintech has reportedly achieved a staggering $22.5 billion valuation. This was followed by a $100 million investment from Tiger Global Management. That is calculated to a nearly 13 percent increase from the firm’s previous $20 billion valuations. Stripe received this following a Tiger Global-led funding in 2018 for $245 million.
A stripe spokesperson said, “Stripe is rapidly scaling internationally, as well as extending our platform into issuing, global fraud prevention, and physical stores with Stripe Terminal, ”in an emailed statement. “The follow-on funding gives us more leverage in these strategic areas.”
One of the areas that are no longer a part of Stripe’s strategic plan is the bitcoin payments.
Stripe in 2014 became the first significant payment processor to add an option for bitcoin. It removed that functionality last year, blaming the time it takes for transaction confirmation is very slow and collection of high fees for a substantial decrease in the number of merchants accepting crypto payments.
When Stripe announced the breakup with Bitcoin, Tom Karlo former Stripe product manager said, “Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions that have been made along the way. And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, and ambitious project do so well.”
After a few months later, Claire Hughes Johnson the Stripe COO made a comment that suggested the breakup was less than amicable.
“The killer app for Bitcoin out there today is ransomware,” she said at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, “I do think we’ve reached that jump the shark moment where you just say ‘da-da-da blockchain.” Replying to this Karlo said that “We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow.”
Till date Stripe’s decision to leave out crypto payments doesn’t seem to have hurt its bottom line. And based on a specific report, it has been ranked as the world’s most valuable fintech unicorn, and along with this enhanced valuation, the firm is pushed even further into the lead.
Its notable US competitor is cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which has achieved an $8 billion valuation. Coinbase is ranked third globally, trailing $10 billion behind the India-based startup One97 Communications.
