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.
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.