Stripe & Shapeshift make some moves — Stuart Hollinger
“In the future, you’re going to see real-world assets being tokenized,” said John-Paul Thorbjornsen, CEO and co-founder of Blockchains LLC. Payment smart contracts are currently being implemented by multiple organizations, including the payment company Stripe. This payment company is one of the biggest payment processors in the United States, and they recently announced that they will soon start accepting payments from smart contracts.
Stripe is an Irish-American financial services and software as a service company dual-headquartered in San Francisco, California and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
By accepting smart contracts as a payment method, Stripe will be making it easier for millions of people around the world to use cryptocurrencies. This is going to be a big step forward for the entire industry, and it is going to allow a lot more people to use cryptocurrencies.
Stripe’s payment service, Stripe Connect, will allow other payment companies to accept payments from smart contracts. This will make it easier for companies that are not part of Stripe to accept payments from smart contracts.
Stripe has the following to say about their new service:
“Stripe Connect provides powerful tools for developers to build and scale new products and businesses. With Connect, developers can establish the technical and business framework that will allow them to create seamless payments experiences for their users. Stripe will notify you when we enable support for new products and features.”
With Stripe Connect, companies can also use Stripe to process payments for them, which is something that is quite useful for companies that are not as big as Stripe.
The Stripe team also made it clear that the platform is open to everyone. All a company needs to do to use Stripe Connect is to sign up for Stripe’s API. Once a company has done that, they will be able to use the Stripe platform to accept payments from smart contracts.
Stripe is not the only one to make big news in the cryptocurrency world today. The cryptocurrency exchange Shapeshift has also made some major announcements. The company has stated that they will soon start offering the ability to convert tokens to fiat.
ShapeShift is a company that offers global trading of a variety of digital assets via web and mobile platforms. It is headquartered in Switzerland, but run out of Denver
Shapeshift is planning to provide support for 25 different tokens at first. The company will be adding more tokens if the platform is successful. So far, the company has not provided a firm timeline for when this service will be available.
Additionally, the company has stated that they will be adding a new service in the form of a cryptocurrency debit card. The company is currently working on this project with the card issuer, Bitnovo. This will be a Visa debit card that will allow people to use their cryptocurrencies to buy things.
The card will also be useful for people who want to cash out the funds they have on their accounts. Customers will be able to cash out their cryptocurrencies with Bitnovo’s card. The company also has plans to add support for more cryptocurrencies in the future. Shapeshift is looking to add more tokens to the platform as well as the ability to accept other assets on the platform.
Stripe & Shapeshift’s announcements are yet another sign that cryptocurrencies are gaining mainstream adoption. These announcements are also a sign that the crypto industry is getting a lot bigger.
One thing I do wonder though… is the government or some other central entity going to come in to this smart contract payment transfer landscape to place some fees at certain points? And if they do, will the user base just switch to different means that haven’t been affected by a central entity? There’s many questions where only time will be able to manifest their answer. We are just at the beginning.
As always,
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