The acquisition of Bridge reflects Stripe’s growing commitment to cryptocurrency. Bridge offers software that enables businesses to accept payments in stablecoins, positioning Stripe to expand its presence in the digital asset space. As the biggest acquisition in crypto history, this deal highlights the increasing intersection of traditional finance and digital currencies. It could signal broader adoption of stablecoin-based solutions within mainstream financial services.
The acquisition would be the largest for Stripe, which is based in San Francisco and Dublin and was valued at $70 billion in July. It would also be one of the biggest acquisitions in crypto history.
Stripe is a payment processing platform that allows businesses to accept credit and debit cards or other payments online.
In March, it reported passing the $1 trillion milestone for total payment volume in 2023, with the output of businesses using Stripe amounting to about 1% of global gross domestic product (GDP).
The deal comes just six months after its co-founder John Collison announced the company would begin supporting global stablecoin payments “this summer.”
It also comes less than two weeks after Stripe introduced stablecoin payments on its main payments user interface by integrating Circle USD (USDC) stablecoin.
Bridge is a stablecoin-based payments network founded in 2022 by two former Coinbase executives — Zach Abrams and Sean Yu — to compete with the SWIFT network and credit cards.
Abrams was the head of consumer at Coinbase and founded Evenly, a P2P payments company that Square eventually acquired.
Yu held engineering roles at Coinbase, Square, Doordash and Airbnb.
Bridge allows businesses to create, store, send and accept stablecoins, which some have referred to as the Web3 answer to Stripe. This year, the firm received $58 million in funding from Sequoia, Ribbit, Index and other investors.
Source: news.bitcoin.com / cointelegraph.com
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