Stripe has begun rolling out stablecoin payments for subscriptions, saying this offering will support artificial intelligence companies and other firms with recurring business models.
This offering will initially be rolled out in private preview to businesses based in the United States and will support subscription payments made in USDC over the Base and Polygon blockchains, according to a Tuesday (Oct. 14) blog post.
Stripe’s introduction of stablecoin payments for subscriptions was driven by the growing number of companies that are using stablecoins to facilitate cross-border payments, the post said.
With the addition of new subscription capabilities, businesses using Stripe can let their customers use their crypto wallets to pay for subscriptions and have those payments settle in fiat, manage fiat and stablecoin subscription payments together in a single dashboard, and integrate stablecoin-based subscriptions with Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite and Stripe Billing, per the post.
“To launch stablecoin subscriptions, we built a smart contract that resolves a fundamental limitation of blockchain-based payments: that wallet owners need to manually ‘sign’ each transaction,” Jennifer Lee, product manager, crypto payments at Stripe, wrote in the post. “The smart contract lets customers save their wallet as a payment method and authorize it to send recurring payments — without needing to re-sign each transaction. Customers can do this with more than 400 supported wallets, and it’s just like saving any other payment method on Stripe.”
Stripe began enabling merchants to accept stablecoin payments for online transactions in October 2024.
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At that time, the company authorized its merchants in the U.S. to receive USDC through their online checkout pages.
In the first 24 hours it offered this capability, Stripe saw that customers from more than 70 countries made purchases with that form of payment.
In May, Stripe launched Stablecoin Financial Accounts that enable businesses to hold balances in stablecoins, receive payments via both crypto and traditional fiat rails such as ACH and SEPA, and send stablecoins to most markets globally.
In June, Stripe President and Co-founder John Collison told Bloomberg that it held initial talks with banks about using stablecoins and that banks “are very interested in how they should be integrated with stablecoins into their product offerings as well.”
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