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Stripe plans stablecoin cards in more than 100 countries by year-end under Privy's Henri Stern
Stripe plans stablecoin card programs in more than 100 countries by year-end and has put Privy chief Henri Stern in charge of its stablecoin and crypto work. Stern is selling the coins as one more option inside the card products Stripe's fiat customers already use.
The Investor · Invest desk
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What happened
- About $1.2 billion of stablecoins were spent through cards last month across the market, triple the figure of a year earlier, according to PaymentScan.
- Stripe's offering pairs its card-issuing business with Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company it bought for $1.1 billion in 2024.
- Kraken, the fintech Ramp and the payments app Morse are among the current customers of Stripe's stablecoin card programs.
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Why it matters
- decision A card program expanding abroad can run on Stripe's stablecoin rails instead of building bank and payments connections in each new country, so that build cost moves from the client to Stripe.
- contradiction Stern's pledge of stablecoin neutrality pulls against his wish that Stripe, Tempo and Open USD feel built to work together, and clients cannot yet tell which of the two will set the defaults.
- exposure Circle's USDC, used by many current programs, keeps its place on Stripe cards only for as long as a distributor that is a founding investor in a rival coin chooses to keep it there.
PaymentScan's $1.2 billion counts the whole market [3]. Stripe did not say how much of it passes through its own programs. At that monthly pace the market spends about $14.4 billion a year on stablecoin cards [18], up from roughly $400 million a month twelve months earlier [19]. Against a stablecoin market of $300 billion-plus [5], a full year of card spending at the current rate comes to at most about 4.8% of the coins outstanding [20]. Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge in 2024 [7]. The price equals about 92% of one month of market-wide stablecoin card spending [21].
The 100-country plan [1] can turn into one of three businesses. Kraken has explored letting customers spend from accounts where they already hold digital assets [9], and that volume is limited to the crypto those customers keep there. Ramp's version is a corporate card taken into new countries on stablecoins instead of rebuilding banking and payments connections market by market [8]. The third is distribution for Stripe's own stack: the Tempo payments blockchain it developed with Paradigm, and Open USD, the stablecoin from Open Standard, where Stripe is a founding investor [10].
Ramp's version is the one a treasury team would recognize. What Ramp avoids is a fresh set of bank and payments connections for every new market [8]. Stripe brings an issuing business that has put out more than 400 million cards since 2018 and processed hundreds of billions of dollars in card volume, Stern said [6]. Bridge brings the stablecoin side [7]. Stern described the coins as an addition to fiat. "We have to cater to folks who are here for stablecoins only, and we have to cater for millions of users of Stripe who are just using fiat rails," he said [14].
The third version is harder to square with his neutrality pledge. Many programs now use Circle's USDC, and Stern said Stripe intends to remain "completely stablecoin agnostic, completely blockchain agnostic" [13]. He also said, "If you're using Stripe, Bridge, Privy, Tempo, Open USD, it should be absolutely amazing, and it should feel like these systems were built to exist together" [12]. Open USD is designed to compete with USDC and Tether's USDT [10], and Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams recently moved to run Open Standard full time [11]. Tokenized deposits and DeFi are also being explored, but "by and far, the bulk of our work happens with stablecoins," Stern said [15].
I think Ramp's version is the one Stripe is building for, and I'd expect the agnostic pledge to hold for as long as clients keep picking USDC themselves. The counter-case is that most of the tripling in PaymentScan's figure [3] comes from crypto holders spending balances they already had. In that case 100 countries is coverage with little volume behind it. If Stripe's stablecoin card volume turns out to come mostly from exchange customers like Kraken [4], I have the wrong idea about where Stripe expects its money to come from.
What to watch
- Whether Stripe reaches the 100-country count by year-end, and which markets launch first.
- Whether Ramp takes its corporate card into new countries on Stripe's stablecoin program, the use case Stern described.
- Which stablecoin new Stripe card programs choose once Open USD is available, a direct test of the agnostic pledge.