John Collison, the co-founder of leading online payments company Stripe, claims the firm is satisfied with being private for the moment. Collison said this during an interview on November 23, adding that the company’s satisfaction with its current status stems from the fact that it is in the initial stages of its journey. His revelation comes after a report claimed the firm was planning to go public as early as 2022.
In the interview, Collison disclosed that Stripe was looking to expand into the Persian Gulf, which comprises countries like the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The company already has clients in the region. These include but are not limited to food delivery company Deliveroo, and Squatwolf, a small gym wear brand.
Collison, who is also Stripe’s President, further divulged that the company entered the UAE in June. However, the firm has seen tremendous growth in the country.
He added that,
This is a massive region that is just starting to inflect in terms of its own growth. It feels like we are very early on that journey, we’re still heavily investing.
Expanding into different areas of finance
Stripe, which has a valuation that exceeds $95 billion (£70.99 billion), has been actively expanding into other areas of finance. These include tax management and lending. However, the company has ruled out the idea of becoming a fully-fledged bank because such a move would attract more costs and regulatory scrutiny.
Interestingly, Stripe has also started working on embracing cryptocurrencies. The firm recently announced that it had formed a team dedicated to crypto and web3.
According to Collison, the crypto market has had several innovations that captured his attention. Specifically, he mentioned Solana (SOL/USD), which emerged as an Ethereum (ETH/USD) competitor. He also mentioned Layer 2 (L2) blockchain systems, such as Bitcoin’s (BTC/USD) Lightning Network, which help expedite transactions and cut costs.
While Stripe is increasingly becoming interested in the crypto space, it is worth noting that the company previously accepted BTC for payments. However, it terminated the payment option in 2018, saying BTC was highly volatile and that its network could not handle a large number of transactions effectively.
Explaining why the company is looking to revisit the crypto-verse, Collison said,
There have been a lot of developments of late with an eye to making cryptocurrencies better and, in particular, scalable and acceptable cost as a payment method.
With these developments, Collison said it would not be implausible for Stripe to resume crypto payments.
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