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.
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.