Stripe closes $1.1 billion Bridge deal and prepares for aggressive stablecoin push

Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, announced that it has completed its acquisition of Bridge Network for $1.1 billion. It’s the largest acquisition to date for the payments company and marks a big bet on stablecoins.

Zach Abrams – cofounder of Bridge, on X:
„We closed our acquisition with Stripe! Together we’re scaling digital dollars to businesses everywhere. Stablecoins aren’t the future—they’re already transforming how people move money today.”

Neetika Bansal – business lead at Stripe, on LinkedIn:
„It’s been incredible hearing from users just how big of an impact stablecoin infrastructure is already making. We believe stablecoins will play a critical role in turbocharging cross-border commerce.„

Previous failure

Stripe had already taken a shot at crypto — and failed. It was one of the first major fintech firms to support bitcoin payments in 2014, but pulled the plug in 2018, citing scalability issues and high transaction fees. Still, the company insisted at the time that it remained “very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall.”

Stablecoins would be Stripe’s next foray. At its flagship Sessions conference in April, the company said it would enable merchants to accept stablecoins for online purchases. In its first week of the offering, Stripe saw more stablecoin volume than in its entire history of offering bitcoin transactions.

However, Stripe was still missing a key component to make it all work. It needed a way to seamlessly handle cross-border transactions.

That’s precisely what Bridge offered, said Neetika Bansal, Stripe’s head of money movement products.

“If you think about Stripe and what we’ve focused on for the past seven years — what I personally have focused on — it’s been about breaking down the barriers for global commerce,” Bansal told CNBC in an interview at Stripe’s office. “We’ve done it, to a large part, on traditional financial rails.”