Online payments platform Stripe has announced plans to withdraw support from bitcoin citing the cryptocurrency’s diminishing demand.

Stripe, which started supporting bitcoin payments from 2014, said that increase in transaction confirmation times, rise in the failure rate of transactions, as well as growing fees has led to a decrease in demand from customers to accept bitcoin.

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It also noted that bitcoin has now largely become an asset rather than a means of exchange.

“Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralised substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive. Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange,” the company said.

The company will stop processing bitcoin transactions from 23 April 2018.

The company, however, noted that it is positive about the crytocurrency market as a whole and is open to adding support for other cryptocurrencies in the future.

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“We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low. Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future,” the company said in a statement.