The Stablecoin Logic of Stripe’s PayPal Bid

Stripe wants to buy PayPal.

Alongside private equity shop Advent International, the payments giant has reportedly offered $60.50 per share, i.e. a $53.4B deal, and PayPal’s board is expected to meet on the offer as early as next week.

Nothing’s finalized, sure, so this intrigue may come and go. If the board doesn’t say no outright, they could demand a higher price.

Yet if the deal does go through, it’d be the largest fintech acquisition ever, which makes the underlying crypto dimensions here that much more interesting.

Of course, if you’ll recall, Stripe has spent the past few years quietly assembling almost every layer of a stablecoin empire.

The heavyweight bought Bridge, a stablecoin issuance platform, for ~$1.1B; it acquired Privy, the top embedded wallets provider; it incubated Tempo, a payments-focused L1 built with Paradigm; and most recently it’s joined +100 other companies to back Open USD (OUSD), a forthcoming consortium stablecoin planning to route reserve yield to distributors rather than issuers.

So what’s missing? People. Hitherto, Stripe has been a B2B company, i.e. plumbing for merchants, devs, etc. It’s had no mainstream consumer relationship, no major mainstream app.

In contrast, PayPal has hundreds of millions of active accounts, plus the Venmo app, plus PYUSD, the stablecoin it launched back in 2023.

For now, we only know from Reuters reporting via anonymous sources that this takeover bid was even made in the first place. We’ll have to wait and see what Stripe says publicly about its rationale for the offer, but could it be that buying distribution for its stablecoin stack is the reason, or one of the reasons?

Stablecoins are crypto’s killer app these days, and the infra arms race that’s followed, e.g. Tempo, Circle’s Arc, Plasma, and so forth, has been run on the assumption that better rails win. This PayPal offer suggests Stripe has internalized a different lesson, namely that the rails are already built, and the war has moved to the gateways.

Consider what this combo could power, after all. Stripe on the merchant side of transactions, PayPal and Venmo facing consumers, then together with a stablecoin settlement layer, there’s a loop. Money moving from consumer wallets to merchants without touching card networks like Visa and Mastercard and their fees. Stablecoins would make this flow cheaper, too, rather than just vertically integrated.

That said, open questions abound. Would PYUSD, currently a $2.8B market cap stable issued via Paxos, migrate to Tempo? Would it fold into OUSD once that launches? Would Venmo become the consumer wallet for Stripe’s chain?

On its own, PYUSD, which is currently less than 1/20th the size of Circle’s USDC, isn’t a huge draw. The real prize is likely the accounts that PYUSD sits in on the PayPal app, i.e. the user base, the app’s reach, the mainstream familiarity.

Also, it’s entirely possible that this deal pans out but doesn’t materialize into a major catalyst for Tempo. Advent would hold an equal stake, and PE firms optimize for cash flows. In other words, a refashioned, cost-disciplined PayPal could just as easily deprioritize its onchain experiments.

Plus there’s a curious cameo worth tracking, as Block, i.e. Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin-centric Cash App parent and Venmo’s direct rival, reportedly contributed to the $17B equity portion of the offer alongside Stripe and Advent. What Block wants out of this arrangement is anyone’s guess right now, but we’ll see where things go from here.

Notably, this bid lands as Robinhood Chain is on the rise with big retail inroads, Base is doubling down on global finance as Coinbase’s onchain capital, Solana is heating up, etc. A Stripe takeover of PayPal would have big TradFi implications, but it could also considerably enhance Tempo’s dominance in the chain wars if it becomes a frontend for the network in some capacity, which in turn would bring Tempo deeper into the mainstream.

This is the main thread to watch right now, and the possibility is somewhat poetic. PayPal once dreamed of building internet-native money but ultimately became a middleman atop card rails. Now Stripe is offering $53B, potentially in part to finish that original job with crypto rails.

It’s true that this deal may die next week. Or it maybe it gets sweetened upwards further before being greenlit. Either way, it’s also true that its mere specter suggests what Stripe might be thinking, and that thinking could be huge for Tempo’s payments prospects going forward.

So PayPal in the front, Tempo in the back? Only time will tell. Whatever happens, Stripe’s ambitions alone hint that its stablecoin empire is undoubtedly only just beginning.