Stripe’s $1.1 Billion Bridge Deal Expands Stablecoin Payments Infrastructure
Oct. 23, 2026 • Deep Dive • Digital Assets
Stripe completed its $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge on February 4, 2025, making the stablecoin infrastructure company its largest purchase to date. The deal gives Stripe technology for moving between dollar-pegged stablecoins and traditional payment rails, while shielding customers from some of the complexity of using blockchains directly.
Bridge has since launched Open Issuance, which lets fintechs, wallets and enterprises create and manage branded stablecoins. Stripe also acquired crypto wallet provider Privy in mid-2025, pairing embedded wallet creation with Bridge’s payment orchestration. The company has outlined plans extending through 2026 to scale Bridge-powered payouts and virtual accounts across more than 100 countries. Together, the moves put issuance, wallets and conversion alongside payment delivery. They do not eliminate the operational demands of stablecoins, but Bridge’s APIs are designed to handle tasks such as transaction fees, cross-chain routing and private-key custody behind a conventional developer interface.
Stripe completed its $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge on February 4, 2025, bringing stablecoin payment infrastructure into the company in its largest transaction to date. The purchase gives Stripe a way to connect digital dollars with conventional payment systems without requiring customers to manage every underlying blockchain process themselves.
Bridge’s platform handles the movement of funds between dollar-pegged stablecoins and local fiat payment rails. Since the acquisition, it has launched Open Issuance, a product that allows fintechs, crypto wallets and enterprises to create and manage branded stablecoins. Stripe has also acquired crypto wallet provider Privy and outlined plans to expand Bridge-powered payouts and virtual accounts across more than 100 countries.
The combined developments clarify what Stripe bought: not a new blockchain, but infrastructure for issuing stablecoins, routing transactions and connecting them to accounts and payment methods that businesses already use.
What Bridge Adds to Stripe
Bridge’s orchestration architecture places standard REST APIs between a business and the technical work of using stablecoins. An API, or application programming interface, lets software systems exchange instructions. In this case, it can give a customer a familiar way to initiate payments while Bridge handles tasks that would otherwise require more direct interaction with blockchain systems.
Those tasks include gas fees—the charges associated with recording blockchain transactions—alongside routing liquidity across chains and managing private-key custody. Private keys are the credentials used to control digital assets. Bridge also supports on-ramping and off-ramping: converting between dollar-pegged stablecoins and fiat money through payment rails including ACH, wire transfers and SEPA.
That combination matters because issuing or receiving a stablecoin is only part of a payment. A business may still need to deliver funds through a bank transfer or convert incoming funds into a form it can use locally. Bridge’s role is to coordinate those steps behind an API rather than leave each customer to assemble them separately.
Issuance, Wallets and Payment Delivery
Open Issuance extends Bridge’s role beyond moving existing stablecoins. The platform lets customers mint and orchestrate their own branded tokens. Its intended users include fintechs, enterprises and crypto wallets such as Phantom. The launch adds issuance to the conversion and routing capabilities already associated with Bridge.
Stripe supplemented that infrastructure by acquiring Privy in mid-2025. Privy provides crypto wallet technology, giving Stripe an embedded wallet component to pair with Bridge’s stablecoin payment orchestration. Wallet creation, stablecoin issuance and movement into or out of fiat payment systems address distinct parts of a transaction; the acquisitions bring those capabilities within Stripe’s broader infrastructure.
The companies have not presented the integration as a finished global rollout. Stripe’s roadmaps extend through 2026 and call for scaling Bridge-powered stablecoin payouts and virtual accounts across more than 100 countries. That is a stated plan, not a claim that those services are already available throughout that footprint.
The Deal’s Scale and Context
Bridge was founded in 2022 by Zach Abrams and Sean Yu. Before the buyout, it had raised $58 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Haun Ventures. It had also reached more than $5 billion in annualized transaction volume and served enterprise clients including SpaceX, Coinbase and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
The reported $1.1 billion deal value was about 5.5 times Bridge’s previous $200 million valuation from its August 2024 Series A round. Accounts differ on the precise composition of the purchase price: initial reports described a flat $1.1 billion transaction, while subsequent analyses said approximately $100 million of that figure involved contingent milestones and executive retention packages. The distinction affects how much of the headline amount should be read as an upfront payment.
Stripe’s move also follows a change in its approach to cryptocurrency payments. The company stopped accepting cryptocurrency in 2018 amid Bitcoin price volatility and fee spikes, then re-entered the market with USDC support in April 2024. Bridge gives it infrastructure aimed at the practical steps around stablecoin use, rather than relying on acceptance of a token alone.
Across blockchains, annual stablecoin transfer volume reached $15.6 trillion in 2024. That figure provides context for the interest in stablecoin settlement, but transaction volume by itself does not establish how much of that activity represents purchases or business payments. For Stripe, the immediate test is whether Bridge’s issuance and conversion tools, alongside Privy’s wallets, can support the wider payout and virtual-account plans it has announced.
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.