Stripe, a payment processing company, has announced that it will no longer support bitcoin payments from April 2018 onwards.

In a blog post, Tom Karlo, a product manager, said that the company would be slowly transitioning away from the cryptocurrency during Q1 of 2018, with support for bitcoin being completely withdrawn on 23rd April. Users will no longer be able to use it for Stripe payments. Since 2015, Stripe has been at the forefront of the bitcoin world, offering people resident in over 60 countries the chance to send bitcoin to other people using its network.

However, the recent boom in interest in the cryptocurrency has caused transaction times and the associated fees to increase, which has lead to a decline in interest among users. The lengthy waiting times and increased fees are a result of the fact that each bitcoin transaction must be verified by the entire network before it is verified.

Despite the pullback from bitcoin services, Karlo writes that he is "very optimistic" about the fate of the wider cryptocurrency market, saying that Stripe may one day offer support for other alt-coins such as stellar lumens. Stripe already has an interest in stellar lumens, as the company provided seed funding.