TLDR Tech / Crypto
Stripe Is Trying to Make Crypto Disappear
Stripe has assembled a full stablecoin payments stack through three acquisitions – Bridge, Privy, and Valora – then co-founded Tempo, a permissioned EVM L1 that reached mainnet in March at a $5B Series A valuation. Bridge holds a conditional OCC national trust bank charter and runs an Open Issuance platform hosting stablecoins for Phantom, Klarna, Hyperliquid, and MetaMask while sharing majority reserve yield with issuers; Privy supports 110M programmable wallets; and Stripe's Link wallet targets 250M consumers, all sitting atop $1.9T in 2025 payment volume. Circle's Arc independently arrived at the same permissioned-L1-with-named-FI-validators design, the GENIUS Act pushes Meta toward Stripe as a stablecoin issuance partner, and OCC's March 2026 proposed rule protects Bridge's non-affiliate yield-sharing model while threatening Coinbase's USDC rewards program.
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