Stripe Integrates Bridge Into Payments Network, Expanding Stablecoin Tools for Enterprises
Oct. 20, 2026 • Deep Dive • Digital Assets
Stripe has integrated Bridge into its Global Payments and Treasury Network, expanding the stablecoin infrastructure available to enterprise customers after closing its acquisition on February 4, 2025. The integration uses pre-funded liquidity pools to settle payouts in seconds while fiat payment rails reconcile separately. Stripe has also published developer documentation for routing, cross-currency conversion and settlement tracking through Bridge’s APIs across more than 10 blockchain networks.
The companies have expanded their commercial tools with automated money management and stablecoin issuance APIs. Bridge’s monetisation framework includes transaction and conversion spread fees, API orchestration charges and reserve yield-sharing mechanisms associated with stablecoins such as USDB. Stripe announced the acquisition in October 2024; the deal was reported at approximately $1.1 billion. The integration gives enterprises a way to use stablecoin infrastructure for payments and treasury operations without managing each underlying network separately.
Stripe has integrated Bridge into its Global Payments and Treasury Network (GPTN), bringing stablecoin-based payout and treasury capabilities into its payments architecture following the acquisition of the infrastructure company. The integration uses pre-funded liquidity pools to settle payouts in seconds, while conventional fiat payment rails reconcile asynchronously. For enterprise customers, the combination is designed to make stablecoin transfers, currency conversion and settlement tracking available through a coordinated set of tools rather than separate blockchain connections.
The companies have also expanded their commercial offering with automated money management tools and stablecoin issuance APIs. Stripe has published unified developer documentation covering automated routing, cross-currency conversions and settlement tracking through Bridge’s APIs across more than 10 blockchain networks. The development places Bridge’s infrastructure within Stripe’s broader payments and treasury offering, rather than treating stablecoin transfers as a stand-alone service.
How the payment rails work
The payout model relies on liquidity being positioned in advance. Pre-funded pools provide funds for a recipient payout without requiring every stage of the conventional fiat process to finish first. Those fiat rails then reconcile asynchronously, meaning their reconciliation does not have to occur at the same moment as the payout. The distinction matters: a payout that settles in seconds does not mean that all related fiat activity finishes in seconds.
Bridge’s role is orchestration across the steps involved in moving and converting value. Stripe’s developer documentation describes automated routing, cross-currency conversion and settlement tracking through Bridge’s APIs on more than 10 blockchain networks. Routing determines how a transfer moves through available infrastructure; settlement tracking gives developers a way to follow its status. Together, those functions address the operational work that would otherwise sit behind a stablecoin payment.
The architecture also separates what an enterprise needs to initiate or monitor from the underlying networks and fiat processes used to complete it. That does not remove the need for liquidity or reconciliation. It brings those functions into a single documented workflow, with pre-funded pools supporting rapid payouts and fiat rails reconciling separately. Stripe has not provided a breakdown of payout speeds by market or network in the supplied information, so the seconds-long settlement claim should be understood as a description of the integrated payout model, not a universal service guarantee.
Enterprise tools and revenue model
Beyond payouts, Stripe and Bridge have introduced automated money management tools and issuance APIs for enterprises. An issuance API lets developers build stablecoin issuance into an application through a software interface; the money management tools extend the offering beyond a single transfer. The verified information does not specify pricing for those products or identify which customers have adopted the newly expanded tools.
Bridge’s monetisation framework has several components: transaction fees, conversion spread fees, API orchestration charges and reserve yield-sharing mechanisms on stablecoins such as USDB. A conversion spread is the difference embedded in a currency exchange price, while an orchestration charge relates to the API services coordinating a transaction. These are distinct from any claim about Bridge’s realised revenue, for which the supplied information provides no figure.
Before the acquisition, Bridge developed USDB as an enterprise-focused stablecoin framework designed to share yield from underlying U.S. Treasury reserves with developers and platforms. That reserve-based mechanism offers another way to structure the commercial relationship around a stablecoin product. The supplied information does not establish what returns any participant has received, or how proceeds are divided under particular customer agreements.
Bridge’s enterprise customer roster included SpaceX, for Starlink revenue repatriation, as well as Coinbase and the U.S. Treasury Department. Those relationships provide context for Bridge’s enterprise focus, but they should not be read as evidence that each organisation uses Stripe’s newly introduced tools.
Acquisition and strategic context
Stripe announced its acquisition of Bridge on October 21, 2024, and the transaction closed on February 4, 2025. The purchase price was reported at approximately $1.1 billion, making it Stripe’s largest acquisition to date. Early accounts differed on confirmation of the valuation: Stripe’s corporate communications initially declined to confirm the exact figure before closing.
Bridge was founded in 2022 by Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, former executives at Coinbase and Evenly. Before the acquisition, it had raised $58 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Index Ventures and Haun Ventures, and reached more than $5 billion in annualised transaction volume. That volume measures transactions moving through the business, not its revenue.
Stripe’s integration follows its reintroduction of crypto payments in 2024, after it had discontinued Bitcoin support in 2018 because of transaction volatility and fees. The current development centres on stablecoin infrastructure for enterprise payments and treasury operations. Its significance lies in how that infrastructure is packaged: Bridge’s routing, liquidity and API functions are being incorporated into Stripe’s network, while the companies expand the tools enterprises can use to manage and issue stablecoins.
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.
ACI Worldwide and Circle announced a pilot on October 27, 2026, involving USDC and connectivity to Colombia’s Bre-B instant payments system. The integration runs through ACI Connetic, a payments orchestration platform, rather than embedding USDC in Bre-B’s central infrastructure. There is no indication that Colombia’s central bank has adopted USDC as a settlement asset for the national network. The distinction matters because ACI also supplies technology for Bre-B’s central directory and real-time clearing engine. Bre-B launched in October 2025 and handled more than 500 million transactions within five months. Connetic is designed to bring traditional payment rails and digital asset networks together without requiring banks to replace legacy core ledgers. ACI says the platform can support other digital assets and liquidity providers, so the pilot does not make USDC its exclusive option. The arrangement tests a vendor-level connection alongside an established public payment system, not a change to that system’s settlement rules.
Ripple received final approval on 26 October 2026 for Ripple National Trust Bank, giving it a federally chartered institution for fiduciary and custody activities. The charter does not authorize commercial deposits or loans, and it does not transfer issuance of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin to the new bank. RLUSD issuance remains with Standard Custody & Trust Company under New York State Department of Financial Services supervision. BNY is the primary custodian of the dollar deposits and U.S. Treasury reserves backing the stablecoin. The arrangement separates a federal custody role from state-supervised issuance. It also comes as the OCC implements the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin rules and faces a lawsuit from the Independent Community Bankers of America challenging its authority to grant national trust charters to crypto firms. Ripple has separately announced an expanded partnership with BNY and Robinhood focused on institutional custody capabilities and exploring tokenized trade finance.
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.
Project Agorá settled approximately CHF 800,000 in live, multi-currency transactions during a July 2026 testing phase. The work examined a cross-border payment model that places tokenised commercial bank deposits on a shared ledger while holding tokenised central bank reserves on jurisdictional ledgers. Five central banks participated directly in live-reserve settlement, although the project’s wider central-bank group has since expanded to eight with the Bank of Canada’s entry. The project reports an average settlement time of 80 seconds across six currencies and uses smart contracts to run anti-money laundering, sanctions and fraud checks simultaneously. Legal analyses found that tokenisation did not change the underlying character of deposits or reserves in participating jurisdictions. The findings support further work on deposit-based wholesale settlement, but the supplied research does not establish that the approach outperforms stablecoins. The Eurosystem plans to draw on Agorá’s architecture for Projects Pontes and Appia.