Stripe Plans Bridge and Visa Stablecoin Card Expansion to More Than 100 Countries by End of 2026
Oct. 27, 2026 • Deep Dive • Digital Assets
Stripe confirmed in October 2026 that it plans to expand its Bridge- and Visa-powered stablecoin card issuing program from 18 initial countries to more than 100 by the end of the year. The planned rollout spans Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. It follows Stripe’s February 2025 acquisition of Bridge, whose APIs connect stablecoin transfers with fiat accounts and bank payouts.
Stripe has also made Open USD available to businesses in Stripe Financial Accounts alongside USDC. Its broader stablecoin infrastructure combines Bridge’s conversion tools with Stripe’s existing payment and treasury network and embedded wallets from Privy. Lead Bank supports the card program as a financial institution partner and BIN sponsor. A separate deployment by Ramp uses Bridge APIs and Privy wallets to let businesses pay vendors in stablecoins using funds from fiat bank accounts. Together, the developments show how Stripe is assembling stablecoin services for business payments, while the planned geographic expansion remains unfinished.
Stripe confirmed in October 2026 that it plans to expand its Bridge- and Visa-powered stablecoin card issuing program from 18 initial countries to more than 100 by the end of the year. The planned rollout covers Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East, extending a program that connects stablecoin funding with payment cards.
The expansion is a test of how Stripe can turn Bridge’s stablecoin infrastructure into services businesses can use through familiar payment and treasury workflows. Stripe acquired Bridge in a deal that closed on February 4, 2025, with a total value of $1.1 billion, including approximately $100 million in contingent earnout payments. The card program is one application of that infrastructure; accounts, conversions and bank payouts are others.
How Bridge connects stablecoins to fiat payments
Bridge supplies orchestration tools that link transfers on stablecoin networks to fiat accounts and banking rails. Its REST APIs include virtual fiat deposit accounts supporting USD, EUR, MXN, BRL and GBP. They also provide liquidation addresses that automatically convert incoming crypto into fiat, and prefunded liquidity accounts designed for real-time bank off-ramps.
A liquidation address gives a business a place to receive a digital asset while triggering conversion rather than requiring the business to manage that asset as part of its ordinary payment process. Prefunding addresses a different operational step: having liquidity available for a bank payout when a stablecoin transfer needs to become fiat. These functions help explain what Stripe bought. The service is not simply a way to transmit tokens; it coordinates receipt, conversion and payout across systems that operate differently.
Stripe has extended its Global Payment and Treasury Network, or GPTN, to stablecoins by treating Bridge conversions as intercompany cash movements between Bridge and Stripe’s regional fiat-licensed entities. Those movements settle through existing shared netting and reconciliation infrastructure. Netting combines obligations for settlement, while reconciliation matches records of the movements. The arrangement places stablecoin conversions within Stripe’s existing financial operations rather than leaving them as a separate workflow.
Cards, accounts and embedded wallets
Lead Bank is the key financial institution partner and BIN sponsor for the Bridge and Visa stablecoin-linked cards. A BIN sponsor supports a card program’s access to the card network. Lead Bank also holds cash reserves and participates in Visa’s on-chain stablecoin settlement pilot. Its role illustrates that the card rollout involves banking and network relationships as well as stablecoin technology.
Stripe has expanded the account side of its offering. On September 30, 2026, it made Open USD, or OUSD, available to businesses in Stripe Financial Accounts alongside USDC. OUSD is described as a money-movement stablecoin backed by a consortium that includes Stripe, Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase. Availability in Financial Accounts is a separate development from the planned expansion of card issuing, but both place stablecoins within products businesses can use for financial operations.
Privy provides another part of the stack. Stripe acquired the company in June 2025, and its embedded non-custodial wallet infrastructure abstracts key management and seed phrases across more than 110 million accounts. A non-custodial wallet leaves control of digital assets outside a conventional custodial account; embedding one reduces the need for a business or its users to handle wallet setup directly. Privy’s role is distinct from Bridge’s work connecting stablecoin movements to fiat banking.
What enterprise adoption shows—and what remains planned
An implementation outside Stripe’s own card rollout shows how the components can be combined. In July 2026, corporate card and spend management platform Ramp launched stablecoin accounts and vendor Bill Pay using Bridge orchestration APIs and Privy embedded wallets. The arrangement lets businesses fund supplier payments from fiat bank accounts and pay vendors in stablecoins without building their own wallet and conversion infrastructure.
The developments point to an orchestration model in which conversion, liquidity, wallets and banking connections are assembled behind business-facing products. They do not, on their own, establish the costs or savings of processing a payment this way. They do show where the operational work sits: between a customer’s account, a stablecoin transfer and the fiat or card systems needed at either end.
Stripe’s leadership has also changed as that work has expanded. In October 2026, Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams moved from his role as Bridge CEO to become full-time CEO of the Open Standard initiative. Privy co-founder Henri Stern oversees Stripe’s crypto and stablecoin business. The next stated milestone is the card program’s planned reach of more than 100 countries by the end of 2026; the confirmed timeline should not be confused with a completed rollout.
Mastercard and Visa are extending stablecoin technology into the systems that settle card payments between financial institutions, while leaving the consumer checkout experience largely unchanged. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026 and has expanded its network’s settlement options to include regulated stablecoins. Visa, meanwhile, is working with Stripe-owned Bridge and Lead Bank on on-chain settlement for card programs. The shift became more concrete in September, when SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live settlement using its bank-issued SoFiUSD. That portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume, a measure distinct from the value settled in stablecoins. Visa separately reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate exceeding $25 billion in October. The networks’ initiatives target the back-end movement and reconciliation of funds, including periods when traditional bank settlement rails are unavailable; they do not require merchants to accept cryptocurrency.
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
Project Agorá’s real-value testing settled 30 live, multi-currency transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000, with atomic settlement averaging about 80 seconds. The tests involved 28 commercial institutions and five central banks. The result shows how tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves could support faster cross-border settlement, though it does not establish that settlement latency has been eliminated. The project’s prototype found that tokenisation did not change the legal character or regulatory obligations of deposits and reserves. Its design also let participating institutions conduct compliance checks concurrently. Seven more commercial banks joined in September 2026, taking private-sector participation to nearly 50 institutions. At Sibos in October, banking executives described the testing pipeline as a step towards production trials alongside the European Central Bank’s Pontes platform. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not participate in the live test transactions, an important qualification for the US dollar tests.
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin. The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.