HomeWorld NewsFintechStripe: Fidelity's unicorn of crypto payments is considering going public

Stripe: Fidelity’s unicorn of crypto payments is considering going public

Stripe, the unicorn of payments, including also crypto, backed by Fidelity Investments and other investors, valued at $95 billion, is taking a year to explore the possibility of a public offering. 

Stripe: the crypto payments unicorn from Fidelity and other investors takes a year to explore public offering

Internet payment processor Stripe, which has become Silicon Valley’s most valuable startup, has decided to take a year to decide whether to conduct a public offering. 

To do so, Stripe has hired Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as advisors, so as to understand time and dynamics and, most importantly, whether or not to debut on the public market. 

Apparently, it appears to be Stripe executives who intend to take the company public or allow employees to sell shares in a private transaction.

With this in mind, Stripe may not go public with an IPO, as its purpose is not to raise funds, but rather it may be that the company goes ahead with a direct listing. 

If that were the case, the unicorn of payments, including crypto, would place existing shares on a public stock exchange, without setting a price but letting it be decided directly by the market itself. 

Fidelity’s unicorn and its history with crypto

Stripe has received support from the likes of major investors such as Fidelity Investments, Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency, and insurance companies Allianz and AXA. 

And indeed, in 2021, the company raised as much as $600 million in a funding round, coming in at a valuation of $95 billion. 

But Stripe has been around since 2009, founded by Irish entrepreneurs John and Patric Collison, and, from the get-go, its purpose has been to provide payment processing solutions to a number of large domestic companies.

Not only that, Stripe also has its own history with crypto that began as early as 2014. In fact, after its evaluations, Stripe had announced that it would accept Bitcoin (BTC) as early as 2015, so that its users could send and receive BTC just as if it were a fiat currency.  

In 2018, these bitcoin payment services were discontinued, partly because Stripe’s own founders allegedly changed their minds about BTC, calling it more of an asset than a medium of exchange. 

Later, during the crypto bull run of 2021, Stripe re-entered the industry by trying to position itself again by supporting fiat payments for cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Essentially, through new app programming interfaces, companies can use Stripe to accept payments in fiat but also in crypto. 

Stripe and crypto payments on Twitter

Recently, a rumor would reveal that Twitter may be ready to launch Coins, in partnership with Stripe itself. 

In reality, though, the new coins on Twitter may not be crypto assets, but just vouchers that can be sent as gifts to creators, who in turn can redeem them for fiat currency through Stripe. 

Nothing official yet. Yet last July 2022, Stripe had officially announced that it was starting doing some testing with Twitter for the introduction of crypto payments. 

The thing is, Twitter already uses Stripe Connect to pay content creators, so the test was just to add cryptocurrencies as a means of payment. Hence, there is nothing to prevent future integration of Coins features with cryptocurrencies. 

Stefania Stimolo
Stefania Stimolo
Graduated in Marketing and Communication, Stefania is an explorer of innovative opportunities. She started out as a Sales Assistant for e-commerce, and in 2016 she began to develop a passion for the digital world, initially in the Network Marketing sector, where she discovered and became passionate about the ideals behind Bitcoin and Blockchain technology, which lead her to work as a copywriter and translator for ICO projects and blogs, and organize introductory courses.
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