Tom Karlo, the Product Manager of the payment processing service Stripe, has announced that the service will no longer allow for bitcoin to be used for payments. In a blog post published on Tuesday the 23rd of January, Karlo said that from April of this year all transactions involving bitcoin would be blocked.

Bitcoin payments were made available by the company in 2015, allowed people living in around 60 different countries to use the service for bitcoin transactions. Karlo writes in his post that bitcoin has since become increasingly less popular with users, due to its slow transaction times and an increase in processing fees.

Karlo noted in his blog post that many were not shunning bitcoin and businesses who still used the cryptocurrency had experienced a loss of revenue. He argued that from observing empirical trends, one can see that there were few cases where the use of bitcoin made practical sense.

However, despite the dropping of bitcoin, Karlo expressed that the company remained highly optimistic about crypto in general and may allow for other cryptocurrencies to be used with the platform in the future. Karlo said that the company might potentially add Stellar lumens to the network soon.