Online payment giant Stripe will allow platforms to pay their content creators using USDC, the second largest stablecoin backed by the dollar. The Twitter platform will serve as a test for this new tool, allowing its users to pay in USDC through Paid Spaces or via Super Follows.
Stripe offers USDC as a payment method
4 years after having put aside a Bitcoin (BTC) considered too volatile and unsuitable for transactions, Stripe seems to have found a replacement of choice for payments in cryptocurrencies. Indeed, the American giant specialized in payment solutions for professionals has announced that the USDC will be offered as an option.
Stripe already offers payment tools via Stripe Connect to renowned commerce platforms such as Shopify or WooCommerce, allowing customers to pay for products of their choice in their own currency, across more than 70 countries.
But last month, the company announced that it was rolling out a suite of products for businesses that specialize in making payments in digital assets, while limiting the risk of fraud via the widely democratized KYC (Know Your Customer) process.
At the time, it had established partnerships with the giant FTX as well as its American subsidiary FTX.US, and others such as Blockchain.com or the French company Just Mining.
But Stripe decided to think bigger, and announced yesterday Friday, April 22, that its partner platforms would be able to instantly pay the various content creators they host through USDC, the second largest stablecoin on the market backed by the dollar rate, and through the Polygon (MATIC) network.
Twitter opens the ball
According to the press release, the famous social network Twitter will be used as a test platform. Indeed, Stripe’s new tool will first be offered to a selected panel of American creators, who will be able to receive payments in cryptocurrencies via Twitter’s Paid Spaces or Super Follows.
This will notably allow creators to connect with their community via innovative means, according to Esther Crawford, Twitter’s Product Manager for Creators:
“Twitter is where people go to have conversations around news. We’re focused on helping creators who fuel that conversation make money and connect with their audience in new ways. We’re excited to start offering cryptocurrency payments to creators via Stripe, so they have more choice in how they get paid.”
The addition of cryptocurrency payments on this type of platform has 2 benefits: it allows the platforms involved to participate in the growth of Web 3.0 without even needing to purchase cryptocurrencies directly, but it also allows them to reach a wider audience of users who prefer to pay on the internet in cryptocurrencies rather than traditional currencies.
Initially, this new payment tool will work through the Ethereum (ETH) Polygon sidechain, which allows near-instantaneous transactions for low costs, and which also has the advantage of having a low carbon footprint, which will soon be almost zero.
So these are the first steps for this new service, which will work initially as a test, but we already know that in the future, Stripe plans to include more networks than Polygon and especially, more crypto-currencies than the USDC.
