Stripe Buys Stablecoin Platform Bridge in a Reported $1.1B Deal

After speculation about the acquisition swirled last week, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington recently confirmed that the deal was finalized.

Stripe has reportedly acquired stablecoin platform Bridge in a deal that could be valued at $1.1 billion, according to TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.

Arrington recently confirmed the deal after rumors of the acquisition began circulating last week. If the deal does close at $1.1 billion, it will be Stripe’s largest acquisition to date and one of the biggest in the still-nascent crypto industry.

“This further supports our strong conviction that stablecoins will continue to see wider adoption in terms of accessibility, use cases, applications, global reach, and regulatory developments,” said Joel Hugentobler, Cryptocurrency Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research. “Stripe provides payment services to about 1% of global GDP, so stablecoins will be a powerful payment option to help them grow their customer base and payment volume around the world.”

Stripe has been trying to integrate crypto into its popular platform since it added bitcoin as a payment option a decade ago. But the company was forced to drop support for bitcoin due to high costs and processing delays.

Recently, however, the company announced that it was working with Coinbase to bring stablecoin support to its platform. Stripe now supports Circle’s USDC on the Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon blockchains, as well as Pax Dollar on Ethereum and Solana. On its first day of stablecoin support, Stripe was able to process transactions in 70 countries.

But the Bridge deal suggests that Stripe’s ambitions go beyond simply enabling stablecoin transactions. Founded two years ago by former Coinbase executives, Bridge is a payments network that gives businesses the ability to create, store, send, and receive stablecoins.

Bridge has even been called the Web3 version of Stripe, and the startup has received $58 million in funding from some of the biggest names in the industry. But the crypto company has yet to be valued anywhere near the $1.1 billion that Stripe will reportedly pay.

Stablecoins, on the other hand, are one of the key payments innovations to emerge in recent years. They are designed to track a fiat currency, such as the U.S. dollar, on a one-to-one basis, and have often been touted as a potential solution for cross-border payments. Tether’s USDT is currently the leading stablecoin, followed by USDC.

Payments giant PayPal also recently launched its own stablecoin, PayPal USD (PYUSD), to great fanfare. It remains to be seen whether Stripe will follow suit after the Bridge acquisition.

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