Stripe jumps on Silicon Valley bandwagon recruits crypto engineers

Crypto has been on everyone’s minds recently, from governments to fintechs to some of the world’s most prominent financial institutions.

Now, it’s the turn of one of the world’s largest fintechs, Stripe.

Last night on Twitter, Stripe’s head of engineering Guillaume Poncin

that he was tasked with building out Stripe’s new crypto team.

“Stripe and crypto have grown up at the same time; we started writing code the year after the Bitcoin paper dropped,” Stripe’s co-founder John Collison also

“We’ve always kept an eye on things (e.g. bitcoin support 2013-2015) but last few years’ developments (L2s, new chains, stablecoins, DeFi) are particularly exciting.”

Poncin is looking for four engineers across the fintech’s New York, San Francisco and Seattle offices—with one remote crypto engineer added into the mix too—to help build Stripe’s crypto team.

“As the usage of cryptocurrency grows worldwide, it opens up new exciting avenues for businesses and individuals to transact and create value,” the company’s job listing reads.

“We hear a growing need from developers and users in that space for better building blocks to accept payments, move funds, exchange between fiat and crypto, etc. By focusing on these problems and needs, we aim to build faster, more trustworthy, and higher quality crypto-enabled experiences.”

Despite being one of the first companies to accept Bitcoin payments back in 2014, Stripe ended its support for Bitcoin payments just four years later—blaming Bitcoin “becoming less useful to payments” as it became increasingly more of an asset rather than a means of exchange.

The move into crypto could be interesting for Stripe, with other fintechs beginning to tread the path into crypto before it.

Fellow fintechs Square and PayPal have stepped into the world of crypto trading, launching their own platforms in 2018 and 2021, respectively.

Stripe’s recent jaunt into the world of crypto will largely have been propelled by its last $600m funding round in March 2021 that saw it valued at $95bn.

In February 2021, Stripe also added former governor of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada Mark Carney to its board.