“The name on the front of the wallet means far less than whose infrastructure clears the payment behind it,” Torab Torabi, CEO of stablecoin infrastructure firm Movement Labs, told CoinDesk.
Stripe has been active in expanding its provision for stablecoin infrastructure in recent years, first through the acquisition of Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2024 and, more recently, the introduction of its own blockchain network Tempo last year.
It is also one of many major firms to join the stablecoin consortium Open USD last month. The digital dollar project, which also involves Coinbase (COIN), Mastercard (MA), Visa (V) and BlackRock (BLK), is built to rival Circle’s USDC as the stablecoin of choice for financial institutions and businesses.
Fate of $PYUSD
One immediate question raised by a potential acquisition of PayPal is the fate of $PYUSD, the dollar-backed stablecoin of which PayPal is the primary distributor.
“The incremental addition of $PYUSD would produce the first fully vertically integrated private digital dollar stack in the market, encompassing issuance and reserve management, settlement and movement rails and enterprise merchant processing,” Citi said in a research note.
“Stripe has previously committed to OpenUSD as its default checkout stablecoin for its merchant base. A consolidated $PYUSD deployment could challenge that commitment, establishing a proprietary commerce-layer stablecoin with simultaneous captive supply-side (millions of Stripe merchants) and demand-side (440 million consumer wallets) distribution.”
