In February 2025 Stripe completed its acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin platform, for roughly $1.1 billion, the payments company's largest deal to date. Bridge, founded by Coinbase and Square alumni, builds infrastructure for moving digital dollars.
Stripe moved quickly to integrate the technology, unveiling new stablecoin features that let businesses hold and move value in dollar-pegged tokens.
Stablecoins as plumbing
The acquisition marked a tangible step by a mainstream fintech giant into crypto rails, reframing stablecoins not as speculative assets but as everyday payment infrastructure, a thesis reinforced later in the year by the GENIUS Act and Circle's IPO.
Payments companies want the rails, not the assets
Acquiring stablecoin infrastructure gives a processor cheaper cross-border settlement without holding volatile inventory. That is a sober, unglamorous use case.
It also means the largest stablecoin flows may end up inside private payment networks, invisible to the on-chain analytics the industry cites as transparency.
