Stripe’s stablecoin empire: from Tempo to OUSD, and then to the acquisition of PayPal—a meticulously planned chess game

By Shannon@金色财经

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

Over the past 18 months, Stripe has carried out a series of seemingly scattered—and yet clearly aimed at the same endpoint—strategic moves.

• Late 2024: Acquired stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for a $1.1 billion premium

• June 2025: Acquired embedded wallet provider Privy

• September 2025: Jointly incubated a payments-focused L1 blockchain, Tempo, with Paradigm

• June 30, 2026: Jointly launched the OUSD stablecoin alliance with 140+ institutions

• July 15, 2026: Teamed up with private equity firm Advent International to make a $53.4 billion acquisition offer to PayPal

Line these five moves up side by side, and you can understand what Stripe really 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 bid represents a 28% premium over PayPal’s closing price from the prior trading day, and 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—but in reality, it’s three things.

First is the consumer access point. Stripe is highly concentrated on the merchant side, while PayPal’s Venmo is a consumer-facing peer-to-peer payments service. This gives Stripe a new channel directly into consumers’ wallets—an area Stripe has long lacked. Stripe has built extremely strong merchant infrastructure, but it has never owned large-scale C-end customer relationships. PayPal has about 440 million active accounts worldwide, and in 2025 it processed about $1.8 trillion in payment volume.

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

Third is the time window. PayPal is in a strategic trough. In early 2026, PayPal released disappointing earnings guidance: the full-year adjusted profit is expected to decline by single-digit percentage points. That same year, it also replaced its CEO, with Enrique Lores (from HP) taking over. A Citi analyst noted that although PayPal is investing heavily to reignite growth, investors are skeptical because “prior transformation efforts failed to reverse the company’s slowing trend.” A valuation trough plus strategic adversity is the best entry point for M&A.

Advent International’s role

Under the deal, Stripe and Advent will hold PayPal equally, with no plan to break up the company.

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

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

Stripe is, at its core, an engineering-culture company, and large-scale integration of traditional enterprises is outside its usual competency zone.

II. Tempo: the payments-focused blockchain Stripe builds itself

To understand Stripe’s stablecoin ambitions, you first need to understand why Tempo exists.

On September 4, 2025, Stripe and Paradigm jointly incubated Tempo, an L1 blockchain built specifically for payments use cases.

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

This is not a general-purpose public chain, but infrastructure tailored for payments from the design stage onward.

Tempo’s design goal 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 generic smart contracts.

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

Tempo disclosed a $500 million funding round at a $5 billion valuation in October 2025, and then launched in March 2026. Since then, this payments-focused blockchain that is betting on commercial institutions will migrate payment flows to stablecoins once it receives sufficient technical support.

Tempo solves the “last mile” problem. With stablecoins, you still need a dedicated chain to carry them. When Stripe merchants receive USDC payments, settlement will happen on Tempo, not on general-purpose chains like Ethereum or Solana.

This gives Stripe unprecedented control over the entire transaction lifecycle.

III. OUSD: rewriting the stablecoin profit-sharing structure

On June 30, 2026, an independent company called Open Standard launched Open USD (OUSD). It has more than 140 initial partners, including some competitors that are fiercely at odds with one another.

The initiating collaborators cover 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), and tech and retail platforms (Google, Shopify, DoorDash).

OUSD is, at heart, a revolution in how economic benefits are allocated

The current economic model for stablecoins is “issuers take it all.” Users hold USDT or USDC, and the interest generated by reserve assets (typically U.S. Treasuries) all accrues to Tether or Circle. In the high-interest-rate environment of 2024 to 2025, this model delivered more than $18k in net profit per year to Tether—but none of it went to the institutions participating in the ecosystem.

OUSD directly upends this logic. OUSD returns most of the reserve yield to participating partners, deducting a small management fee. And企業 issuance and redemption of OUSD is completely free, with no supply cap. In essence, it shares the money Tether and Circle earn with the alliance members.

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

Stripe’s strategic role in OUSD

Stripe has officially announced that it will designate OUSD as the default stablecoin for its platform enterprises, while Coinbase confirmed that OUSD will be live on Base and other chains later this year.

That means all stablecoin transactions in Stripe’s merchant network will, by default, flow through OUSD.

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

That completes the chessboard: Stripe merchants use OUSD as their stablecoin, settle on Tempo, and the reserve yield flows back to Stripe and its partners—a self-consistent closed-loop economic system.

IV. The system logic behind the five moves

Once you connect every action, you can see a clear construction path:

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

Acquire 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.

Incubate Tempo (2025) → Build a dedicated settlement layer for payments. Tempo solves the “on which chain to settle” problem, allowing Stripe to control the underlying infrastructure for the entire transaction lifecycle.

Launch OUSD (June 2026) → Rewrite stablecoin profit 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.

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

V. Impact on the stablecoin landscape

This sequence of actions will disrupt the existing stablecoin market landscape in all directions.

Tether (USDT): temporarily safe, but under long-term pressure

Tether’s moat lies in deep penetration in offshore markets and user inertia. OUSD’s battlefield is enterprise payment scenarios, which overlaps less with Tether’s current core market (exchanges, crypto-native trading). But once OUSD builds a sufficiently large enterprise user base, expanding into retail markets is not hard.

Circle (USDC): directly challenged

On the day OUSD news was released, Circle’s share price crashed by 17.55%, and the monthly decline widened to 39%. Former Messari analyst Sam Raskin pointed out that OUSD’s new model could seriously challenge USDC, forcing Circle to expand its revenue-sharing agreements, find new partners, or pivot into other business areas. Among USDC’s user base, there is a large share of institutions and enterprises—and that is exactly OUSD’s main target direction.

PYUSD (PayPal): acquisition 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 possibility 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 mean Stripe will give up Solana or Ethereum. Stripe has confirmed it will support Tempo as a settlement option alongside Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon. But as the Tempo ecosystem matures, core commercial payments traffic will increasingly tilt toward Tempo—an unavoidable tension between commercial traffic and public-chain narratives.

The banking system: the biggest underlying threat

This is the least discussed—but most disruptive—aspect of Stripe’s chessboard. 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 end-state of this combo is a full-stack infrastructure that can replace traditional banks’ cross-border settlement and account management functions—doing the SWIFT business, but using stablecoin cost structures.

Conclusion

What Stripe is building is not a payments tool, but a global currency movement operating system.

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

Each move fills a slot on the same picture.

On the day that picture is complete, a corporate payment sent from Shanghai to Amsterdam can be settled on Tempo with OUSD, with Bridge handling fiat conversion, Privy managing the accounts, and PayPal’s 440 million user network completing the final delivery.

No traditional banks are involved end-to-end, and it does not rely on any existing stablecoin issuers; the interest stays within the alliance.

This is the outline of a closed-loop, self-sufficient financial system.

As for whether it can be built—whether PayPal will accept 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 questions worth tracking throughout the second half of 2026.

But the direction is already clear.

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