Understanding Stripe: A Five-Move Chess Plan for Building a Stablecoin Market

Written by: Shannon

Stripe’s stablecoin empire is starting to show signs of greatness.

Over the past 18 months, Stripe has carried out a series of strategy moves that look fragmented on the surface, but point to the same end goal.

• Late 2024: Acquired stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for a $1.1 billion premium
• June 2025: Acquired embedded wallet provider Privy
• September 2025: Co-developed a payments-focused L1 blockchain, Tempo, with Paradigm
• June 30, 2026: Co-launched an OUSD stablecoin alliance with more than 140 institutions
• July 15, 2026: Teamed up with private equity firm Advent International to submit a $53.4 billion acquisition offer to PayPal

Lay these five moves side by side, and you can understand what Stripe truly wants to do.

I. The strategic logic behind the $53.4 billion offer

Stripe and Advent International have teamed up to propose acquiring PayPal for $60.50 per share, for a total value of more than $53.4 billion.

The offer represents a 28% premium to PayPal’s closing price from the previous trading day. PayPal’s stock surged by about 17% on the day. This would be the largest fintech M&A deal in history.

What is Stripe buying?

On the surface, it’s a payments company; in reality, it’s three things.

First is the consumer interface. Stripe is heavily concentrated on the merchant side, while PayPal’s Venmo is a consumer-facing peer-to-peer payments service—giving Stripe a new direct channel to consumers’ wallets. This is a long-missing piece for Stripe: it has built extremely sophisticated merchant infrastructure, but it has never held a large-scale C-end user relationship. PayPal has around 440 million active accounts globally, and processed about $1.8 trillion in payment volume in 2025.

Second is the stablecoin distribution network. Stripe and PayPal are two of the most important mainstream financial firms bringing stablecoins into the traditional payments rails. PayPal’s own stablecoin, PYUSD, is already live in the market. If Stripe completes the acquisition, PYUSD’s existing user base and compliance framework would be directly folded into the stablecoin empire Stripe is building—an express path to a scale jump.

Third is the timing window. PayPal is in a strategic low. In early 2026, PayPal released disappointing profit guidance; full-year adjusted profit is expected to decline by single-digit percentages, and the company also replaced its CEO, with Enrique Lores of HP taking over. A Citi analyst noted that although PayPal is investing heavily to reignite growth, investors are skeptical because “previous transformation efforts failed to reverse the company’s slowdown trend.” A valuation trough plus strategic difficulties makes it the optimal entry moment for an M&A deal.

Advent International’s role

Under the plan, Stripe and Advent would each hold PayPal equally, with no plan to split the company.

Advent is a mature private equity firm deeply focused on the fintech sector. Bringing it in implies two things.

First, it shares the up to $50 billion burden of bank financing. Second, it brings professional M&A integration capabilities.

Stripe is essentially an engineering-culture company, and large-scale integration of traditional enterprises is outside its core wheelhouse.

II. Tempo: The payments-dedicated blockchain Stripe builds itself

To understand Stripe’s stablecoin ambitions, you first need to understand the existence of Tempo.

On September 4, 2025, Stripe and Paradigm co-incubated Tempo, an L1 blockchain built specifically for payment scenarios.

Tempo is an independent company (Stripe and Paradigm are the first batch of investors). It is led by Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang, with the goal of achieving more than 100k transactions per second and sub-second finality to meet Stripe’s global payments scale needs.

This is not a general-purpose public chain; it is infrastructure designed from the start specifically for payments.

Tempo’s design target is to become a stablecoin settlement chain, with fixed and predictable fees, compliance hooks that are friendly to regulation, and throughput tuned for payment workloads rather than for general smart contracts.

Tempo’s permissionless blockchain will be built with a decentralized exchange optimized for stablecoins. UBS, Mastercard, and Kalshi have joined Tempo as “design partners.”

Tempo disclosed a $500 million funding round with a $5 billion valuation in October 2025, and officially launched in March 2026. From then on, this payments-focused blockchain betting on commercial institutions will migrate payment flows to stablecoins after receiving full technical support.

Tempo solves the “last mile” problem—once you have stablecoins, you still need a dedicated chain to carry them. When Stripe’s merchants receive USDC payments, settlement will occur on Tempo rather than on general chains like Ethereum or Solana.

This gives Stripe unprecedented control over the entire transaction flow.

III. OUSD: Rewriting the stablecoin profit distribution structure

On June 30, 2026, an independent company called Open Standard released Open USD (OUSD). It has more than 140 initial partner organizations, including some fierce competitors that overlap with each other.

The initiating partners span payments and financial services (Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, American Express), asset management (BlackRock), banks (BNY, DBS, Standard Chartered, BBVA), crypto-native institutions (Coinbase, Aave, MetaMask, Morpho, Solana), as well as tech and retail platforms (Google, Shopify, DoorDash).

At its core, OUSD is a revolution in the way benefits are structured

The current stablecoin economic model is “issuers keep everything.” Users hold USDT or USDC, and the interest generated by reserve assets (typically U.S. Treasuries) is entirely owned by Tether or Circle. In 2024 to 2025, when interest rates were high, this model brought Tether net profits of over $18k per year, but none of the institutions participating in the ecosystem received a share.

OUSD directly overturns this logic. OUSD returns most reserve earnings to participating partners, subtracting only a small management fee, and corporate minting and redemption of OUSD are completely free with no supply cap. In essence, it shares the money earned by Tether and Circle with alliance members.

Notably, the two largest stablecoin issuers, Tether and Circle, are clearly not part of this new alliance.

Stripe’s strategic role in OUSD

Stripe has officially announced OUSD as the default stablecoin for its platform enterprises, and Coinbase has confirmed that OUSD will enter Base and other chains later this year.

This means that all stablecoin transactions across Stripe’s merchant network will default to flowing through OUSD.

OUSD also announced it will be deployed on Tempo and other L1 networks.

That completes the whole board: Stripe’s merchants use OUSD as the stablecoin, settlement happens on Tempo, and reserve earnings flow back to Stripe and its partners—forming a self-consistent closed-loop economic system.

IV. The system logic behind the five moves

By connecting all actions, you can see a clear build path:

Acquiring Bridge (2024) → Gain stablecoin issuance and cross-border routing capabilities. Bridge solves the “how stablecoins move” problem, enabling Stripe to accept USDC payments in more than 70 countries and settle in local currencies.

Acquiring Privy (2025) → Fill the wallet layer. Privy solves the “how users hold and use stablecoins” problem, giving Stripe its own capabilities at the account and wallet layers.

Incubating Tempo (2025) → Build a payments-dedicated settlement layer in-house. Tempo solves the “which chain settlement happens on” problem, letting Stripe control the underlying infrastructure of the entire transaction pipeline.

Collaborating on OUSD (June 2026) → Rewrite stablecoin benefit distribution. OUSD solves the “who issues the coin and how benefits are distributed” problem, using an alliance model to counter the monopolies of USDT and USDC.

Acquiring PayPal (July 2026) → Gain the consumer interface and scale. PayPal solves the “who uses this system” problem, and PayPal’s 440 million active accounts are the most direct distribution channel for this infrastructure.

V. Impact on the stablecoin landscape

This series of moves will disrupt the existing stablecoin market structure across the board.

Tether (USDT): Safe for now, but under long-term pressure

Tether’s moat lies in its deep offshore market penetration and user inertia. OUSD’s battlefield is enterprise-grade payment scenarios, which overlaps less with Tether’s current core markets (exchanges and crypto-native trading). But once OUSD builds a sufficiently large base of enterprise users, spreading to retail markets won’t be hard.

Circle (USDC): Directly challenged

On the day the news about OUSD was released, Circle’s stock price plunged 17.55%, and its decline expanded to 39% over the month. Former Messari analyst Sam Raskin pointed out that OUSD’s new model could seriously challenge USDC, forcing Circle to expand its revenue-sharing agreements, seek new partners, or pivot to other business areas. Within USDC’s user base, many are institutions and enterprise users—precisely OUSD’s primary target direction.

PYUSD (PayPal): Being acquired means integration

If Stripe completes the acquisition of PayPal, PYUSD’s fate will depend on the integration strategy. One possibility is that PYUSD is replaced by OUSD. Another is that PYUSD and OUSD run in parallel, jointly serving PayPal’s 440 million users—this would greatly accelerate OUSD’s penetration speed.

Crypto-native L1s (Solana, Ethereum): Competition and cooperation coexist

Tempo’s emergence doesn’t necessarily mean Stripe is giving up on Solana or Ethereum. Stripe has confirmed it will support Tempo as a settlement option alongside Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon. But as Tempo’s ecosystem matures, more and more of the core commercial payments traffic will tilt toward Tempo—creating an inevitable tension between commercial transaction flow and the public-chain narrative.

The banking system: the biggest deep-seated threat

This is the most disruptive aspect of Stripe’s playbook that gets discussed the least. In 2025, Stripe also acquired Orum (a bank real-time payments and multi-rail routing orchestration layer) and Metronome (a usage-based billing company). The endpoint of this combo punch is a full-stack infrastructure capable of replacing traditional banks’ cross-border settlement and account management functions—doing SWIFT’s business while using a stablecoin cost structure.

Conclusion

What Stripe is building isn’t a payments tool, but a global money-movement operating system.

Tempo is the pipeline, OUSD is the circulating money, Bridge is the routing layer, Privy is the wallet, and PayPal is the distribution network.

Each move fills a blank space on the same map.

On the day the map is complete, an enterprise payment sent from Shanghai to Amsterdam can be settled with OUSD on Tempo, with Bridge handling fiat conversion, Privy managing accounts, and final reach completed by PayPal’s 440 million user network.

All without going through any traditional bank, and without relying on any existing stablecoin issuers—interest stays inside the alliance.

This is an emerging form of a closed-loop, self-sustaining financial system.

As to whether it can ultimately be built—whether PayPal accepts the acquisition offer, whether OUSD can shake USDT and USDC’s market position, and whether regulators will allow all of this to happen.

These are all questions worth tracking throughout the second half of 2026.

But the direction is already clear enough.

Stripe’s stablecoin empire is starting to show its greatness.