Stripe cautiously sizes up cryptocurrency space once again

13 Oct 2021

Image: © rarrarorro/Stock.adobe.com

Three years after dropping bitcoin, Stripe is hiring a small, experienced team of crypto engineers.

Payments company Stripe has started to assemble a dedicated cryptocurrency engineering team.

Although it stopped supporting bitcoin in 2018, the fintech founded by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison is now looking to focus on the crypto market again.

According to a source who spoke to CoinDesk, the company is taking a cautious approach for the moment and wants to remain “tech-neutral” when it comes to crypto. Stripe dropped bitcoin in 2018 due to the cryptocurrency’s volatility and lengthy transaction times.

The company’s new crypto engineering team will be run by senior Stripe staffer Guillaume Poncin, its former head of engineering for banking and financial products.

Stripe is looking to hire at least four people to help plot its future crypto strategy. It is a relatively modest team for the company, which has around 4,000 employees in total.

Yesterday (12 October), Poncin tweeted: “We’re starting a new crypto team at Stripe. I’m hiring engineers and designers to build the future of Web3 payments.”

The company is looking for “experienced engineers in the cryptocurrency space”, according to the job advertisements currently on its website. It is ideally looking for senior team members with a decade’s experience or more who will be able to “support and inform” the company’s crypto strategy.

The advertisement said that the engineers can expect to be involved in the designing and building of the core components needed to support crypto use cases. They will work “across everything from web or mobile UIs to back-end, payments and identity systems”.

The job ad also acknowledged the growth of cryptocurrencies worldwide and said the company aims to “build faster, more trustworthy, and higher-quality crypto-enabled experiences”.

The payments company made headlines in 2014 when it announced it was initially supporting bitcoin. It also lent its support to non-profit Stellar, which is developing an “open network for money”.

With its new crypto team, Stripe hopes “to be at the forefront of a new wave of innovation,” the jobs post said.

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Blathnaid O’Dea is Careers reporter at Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com