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Online payments expert Stripe recently added Bitcoin payment support to its API, following which users will able to accept payments in digital currency alongside credit cards. The new-feature is scheduled to come out of beta testing in January 2015 and will charge a fee of 0.5% per transaction.

Launched in March 2014, Stripe has earned itself a reputation for offering hassle-free online payment APIs to address businesses of all sizes. Until now, the company’s platform was supporting only credit card payments, but due to the increase requests from users, it eventually decided to add Bitcoin support alongside.

From the look of it, Stripe seems just like another Bitcoin payment processors that convert BTC to USD in real time for merchants, in order to avoid market volatility. The company’s advice page clearly elaborates this progression in detail. Here is an excerpt:

“When you [merchants] use Stripe Bitcoin, your customer pays in bitcoin and you receive dollars in your bank account. At the time of the payment, the customer’s bitcoin are converted to dollars at market rate. This enables you to accept payments from any bitcoin user without taking on volatility risk.”

Stripe however hasn’t any revealed whether it is processing the Bitcoin payments by itself, or has hired a third party organization for the service. Such insight details might come to the surface only around the time of the Bitcoin support’s full-fledged launch.


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