What Stripe Bought for $1.1 Billion

When Stripe closed its acquisition of Bridge on February 4, 2025, the price tag drew all the attention. Stripe paid $1.1 billion, roughly 5.5 times the last mark, for a company founded in 2022 that had raised its Series A at a $200 million valuation six months earlier.

Most coverage treated it as a crypto premium, Stripe overpaying for access to stablecoins while the market ran hot. But the deal reads more clearly by date, separating what Bridge brought to the closing from what its team built afterward.

At close, Stripe got production mint-and-burn contracts running across multiple blockchains, an orchestration business with customers that reportedly included Coinbase and SpaceX, and a team of about 60 engineers who operated all of it.

Within about a year, that team had launched a dollar stablecoin and a white-label issuance platform, and had won conditional approval for a federal trust bank charter. Twenty months after closing, the stack underpins stablecoin accounts in 101 countries and a new Layer 1 blockchain, along with a payments protocol for AI agents.

What Stripe bought: the contracts

Bridge operates production mint-and-burn smart contracts across multiple blockchains. Its orchestration product, which moves stablecoins between chains and converts between types, runs on chains including Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, and Tron. For issuance, where partners mint branded stablecoins, Bridge's docs list thirteen chains, from Ethereum and Solana to Base, Sui, HyperEVM, and Tempo.

Each chain runs a different execution environment and fee model. Ethereum's EVM, Solana's Sealevel runtime, and Stellar's built-in asset model each require separate implementations of the same business logic, and even EVM-style chains like Tron differ in fees and tooling.

Building this from scratch means hiring engineers who understand each chain's execution model, then deploying and auditing contracts on every one of them. You need hot wallet infrastructure that handles each chain's signing scheme separately. A bug on Solana doesn't necessarily surface on Ethereum because the implementations differ, even though the business logic is supposed to be identical.

Bridge had already shipped this and was running it in production for customers including Coinbase and SpaceX, according to CNBC.

What Stripe bought: the team

CNBC reported that Bridge's roughly 60-person team began onboarding at Stripe's San Francisco headquarters after the close. Bridge continued operating as a standalone product, the same approach Stripe later used for Privy.

Those engineers had already built smart contract deployments across multiple chains and the hot wallet operations behind them. Had Stripe built this in-house instead, it would have been hiring for those skills one engineer at a time against every other company building stablecoin infrastructure, starting with no operating experience.

What the team produced in its first year inside Stripe is the better measure of what the price bought.

What the team built: USDB

Bridge launched its own stablecoin, USDB, on May 7, 2025, three months after closing. It's backed 1:1 by cash and BlackRock money market funds.

USDB is aimed at developers, and Bridge passes most of the reserve yield back to them as a usage rebate rather than keeping it as margin. That puts it against USDC's model, where reserve income is the business, since Circle reported roughly $1.7 billion in 2024 revenue in its S-1 filing, nearly all of it from reserves.

What the team built: Open Issuance

In September 2025, about eight months after closing, Bridge launched Open Issuance. The platform lets any business launch a branded dollar stablecoin without building the underlying infrastructure. Bridge handles reserve management through BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, and Superstate, along with mint-and-burn contracts, regulatory compliance, and custody. The partner gets a branded coin.

MetaMask launched mUSD on the platform, Phantom launched CASH, Hyperliquid launched USDH through Native Markets, and Sui launched USDsui, while Klarna launched KlarnaUSD on Tempo's testnet with mainnet planned for 2026.

On June 2, 2026, MoneyGram launched MGUSD on Stellar, the biggest Open Issuance deployment so far, with Bridge as issuer, M0 handling the mint-and-burn layer, and Fireblocks providing custody. MoneyGram's network reaches more than 60 million active users through close to half a million retail sites. A remittance customer can hold dollar stablecoins in a self-custodial wallet inside the MoneyGram app.

Open Issuance turns Bridge from infrastructure that moves stablecoins into a factory that produces them, and Stripe can now let any partner issue a stablecoin on its plumbing.

The yield economics remain opaque, though. How the reserve return splits between Bridge and its branded-stablecoin partners hasn't been publicly disclosed, and whether Bridge keeps 10 basis points or 100 on each partner's reserves changes the long-term revenue math for the entire platform. MGUSD, the highest-profile deployment, launched without publishing a reserve composition breakdown.

What the team built: the charter

Bridge applied for a national trust bank charter in October 2025, eight months after the deal closed. In February 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted conditional approval covering stablecoin custody, issuance, orchestration, and reserve management under direct federal oversight.

Most stablecoin companies operate as state-licensed money service businesses, applying jurisdiction by jurisdiction and answering to a patchwork of regulators with different requirements in each state. Circle, the issuer of USDC and Bridge's largest competitor in stablecoin issuance, still works this way.

A federal OCC charter replaces all of that with a single regulator. It's the difference between renewing a food license in every county and holding a single federal franchise agreement that covers all of them. Bridge files a single application and answers to one examiner instead of fifty.

The OCC gave similar conditional approvals to Circle, Ripple, Paxos, BitGo, and Fidelity Digital Assets in December 2025, and Bridge's came two months later. The four-month turnaround matters for the build-vs-buy math, because it means the charter itself wasn't the slow part of building a stablecoin business.

But conditional is not final, and the charter system is under legal attack. The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the OCC on October 2, 2026, arguing that the agency exceeded its authority by chartering trust banks for non-fiduciary activities. The suit challenges the OCC's March 2026 rule and asks the court to vacate one crypto firm's charter, but a ruling against the OCC's interpretation could reach other crypto trust charters, including Bridge's conditional one.

What Stripe built on top

Within three months of closing, the same week Bridge launched USDB, Stripe launched stablecoin financial accounts in 101 countries. Businesses in markets where Stripe previously had no presence could hold USD balances, send and receive dollars through ACH or wire, move euros through SEPA, and transfer stablecoins across eight blockchain networks. The country list skews toward emerging markets, though it excludes some large ones like Nigeria and South Africa.

In June 2025, Stripe acquired Privy, a wallet infrastructure provider that powered over 75 million accounts across more than 1,000 teams at the time of the deal. Privy handles embedded wallets with familiar login flows like email, SMS, and single sign-on. Combined with Bridge, Stripe now held both the stablecoins and the wallets that store them.

On March 18, 2026, Stripe and Paradigm launched Tempo, a payments-focused Layer 1 blockchain built on Paradigm's Reth client. Tempo is EVM-compatible, charges fees in stablecoins rather than a native token, and targets throughput above 100,000 transactions per second, according to Tempo's launch page.

The same day, Stripe introduced the Machine Payments Protocol, an open standard for AI agents to pay for services over HTTP. An agent receives a 402 response with pricing, makes the payment, and gets the resource. Stripe says over 100 services adopted it at launch, reportedly including Anthropic and OpenAI.

Bridge's multi-chain contracts gave the financial accounts a settlement layer, and Tempo became one of the chains Bridge issues stablecoins on.

The competitive spectrum

Stripe wasn't alone in buying stablecoin infrastructure during this period. Each major payments company chose a different point on the build-buy-partner spectrum.

Mastercard paid up to $1.8 billion for BVNK in August 2026, acquiring the conversion layer between fiat and stablecoins across 130 jurisdictions. PayPal co-developed PYUSD with Paxos, a regulated issuer, contracting for manufacturing capacity while keeping distribution through its own wallets. Visa partnered with Circle to settle in USDC, adding a stablecoin rail without acquiring any infrastructure.

Of the four, only Stripe owns the full issuance stack, so when a partner asks for a branded stablecoin, Stripe can say yes without calling anyone else.

What we can't verify

Bridge's conditional OCC charter has not advanced to final approval as of October 2026. The ICBA lawsuit challenging the OCC's chartering authority could slow or block that process.

Tempo's 100,000+ TPS target comes from its own launch materials. Independent benchmarks at production scale haven't been published.

Open Issuance's yield-sharing terms between Bridge and its partners are private.

Post-acquisition transaction volume growth has been reported by secondary sources but not confirmed with audited figures by Stripe or Bridge.

The build-vs-buy math

Stripe processed about $1.9 trillion in payments in 2025, so the $1.1 billion price works out to roughly 0.06% of one year's volume.

Building the equivalent in-house would have meant assembling a smart contract team in a competitive hiring market, deploying and auditing contracts across a dozen chains, and winning customers to prove the orchestration business worked. Only then could the work Bridge did in its first year inside Stripe begin.

Bridge's charter application won conditional approval in about four months, so the slow part of building this in-house would have been everything before the application, which is what Stripe paid $1.1 billion to skip.

Twenty months in, branded stablecoins are minting on Bridge's contracts and businesses in 101 countries hold stablecoin financial accounts. Whether the price looks like a premium or a bargain depends on whether the charter survives the courts and on how much revenue Stripe's stablecoin business produces over the next three years.