Stripe gave up on bitcoin, but co-founder John Collison is excited about the future of c…

Stripe may have given up on bitcoin as a payments method — at least temporarily — but it’s not giving up on cryptocurrencies more broadly.

Stripe president and co-founder John Collison says that despite Stripe’s decision to stop processing bitcoin payments, he sees a lot of potential for cryptocurrencies to succeed as a payments method, especially outside of the United States where payments infrastructures aren’t well established.

“We’re very excited by [the] longterm potential for the payments use cases of crypto,” he said Monday from onstage at Recode’s Code Commerce conference in New York. “Especially not in the United States or kind of near-term companies that have pretty well-functioning payments systems. But as you go to a lot of far-flung countries, if we wanna offer easy APIs to pay out to long-tail countries, we think there could be a bunch of interesting ideas there.”

Stripe wasn’t shy about its frustrations with bitcoin, which had a…