Stripe Partners With India’s Polygon To Enable Crypto Payouts

Stripe, the global fintech giant, has announced that it will be making payouts to its creator community in cryptocurrency, and it will use Indian web3 startup Polygon’s network to do so.

In a tweet on Friday, Stripe announced the development, paired with a blog post that detailed the first steps for the same, and the future goals.

Explaining the rationale behind choosing Polygon, Stripe said, “Payouts will take place over the Polygon network, which we chose for its low fees, speed, integration with Ethereum, and broad wallet compatibility (including MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, and Rainbow).”

For now, the fintech giant will pilot the payouts solution with Twitter. Twitter pays its creators via Twitter monetisation, and Stripe is partnering with Twitter to make that happen. Initially, Stripe has said that it will make the payments in USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar, and the users will have the option to connect multiple wallets supported by Polygon.

“Stripe will handle all crypto-related complexity and operations. No code changes are required, and platforms can avoid taking on the challenges of acquiring, storing, or transferring crypto themselves,” Stripe said in a blog post.

Users will also be able to either keep the balance in their wallets or bridge it to Etherium and convert it to some other currency apart from the USDC.

Twitter pays its creators with the help of Connect, and there, creators will be able to connect their Polygon-supported wallets, such as MetaMask and Rainbow, among others, to receive payments in USDC.

Polygon CEO Ryan Watts said in a tweet that this will allow Stripe to pay creators, freelancers, and others in crypto.

“This isn’t just monumental news for $MATIC but all of crypto as we continue to push the space forward,” Watts added.

Stripe has been making headways in India as well since acquiring Bengaluru-based Recko which provides payments reconciliation software for internet businesses in October 2021.

Soon thereafter, Delhi NCR-based Clear (formerly ClearTax) announced that Stripe has backed it in its $75 Mn Series C round.

Polygon, founded in 2017, is an Ethereum Layer-2 scaling startup, and it had recently raised a first funding round worth $450 Mn in February 2021.

While the Ethereum blockchain is one of the most widely used in the world, it faces capacity issues and high gas fees for consumers and developers. As part of a broader strategy to expand Ethereum’s capacity and pave the way for broader blockchain adoption, Polygon moved away from its MATIC platform for Layer-2 to work on zero-knowledge proofs.

According to Stripe, Polygon PoS has seen a billion transactions recorded last year. More than 130 Mn unique addresses and more than 2.67 Mn monthly active users now generate some 3 Mn transactions per day, which is said to be 2x what Ethereum does.

Right now, web3 and crypto are looking at an unprecedented interest from both the general public and from a building and VC perspective. At The Makers’ Summit 2022, Arindam Roy, CEO and cofounder, Pillow, highlighted that there are already 65 web3 unicorns in the world, with more than $30 Bn in investments in 2021 alone.

Other payments solution providers such as PayPal have already moved into crypto, with the payments gateway offering its users the option to buy, sell, and hold crypto, starting with investments as low as $1.

On the flip side, Amazon had said in July 2021 that the ecommerce giant will not move into cryptocurrency ‘any time soon’.