Author: KarenZ, Foresight News
Original Title: Stripe's Path to Stablecoin Dominance: Acquisition of Bridge, Securing Privy, and Developing Tempo
Financial technology giant Stripe is accelerating its layout in the stablecoin and payment domains.
A recently removed job posting revealed its secret collaboration with crypto venture capital firm Paradigm - the two parties are jointly constructing a high-performance blockchain dedicated to payments named Tempo.
This move is a key step in Stripe's continuous layout in the stablecoin track, reflecting its ambition to reshape the global payment system and even the financial landscape.
Tempo: A Layer1 Blockchain Focused on Payments
According to a product marketing job posting archived on Fortune magazine and the Blockchain Association website (now removed), Tempo is positioned as a "high-performance, payment-focused blockchain (Layer1)" currently in a confidential phase. The team currently has 5 members and is recruiting its first product marketing personnel.
The position requires applicants to be familiar with fintech/payment or cryptocurrency fields, with "marketing experience for Fortune 500 companies", suggesting its target customer group is large enterprises.
According to Fortune magazine citing four informed sources, Tempo is a Layer1 using an Ethereum-compatible programming language.
This technical choice ensures independence while leveraging Ethereum ecosystem's mature developer resources to lower application barriers.
Notably, Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang is both a Stripe board member and an early investor in Privy, a crypto wallet company acquired by Stripe. Paradigm led Privy's $18 million Series A funding in November 2023, with Matt Huang joining Privy's board. In March 2025, Privy announced completing a $15 million funding round led by Ribbit Capital, with Sequoia Capital, Paradigm, and Coinbase participating. This deep connection laid the foundation for Paradigm and Stripe's collaboration.
In fact, in February this year, Matt Huang stated that Paradigm is discussing with some of the world's largest enterprises to help them develop stablecoin strategies, such as faster global expansion or easier fund custody.
From Acquisition to Collaboration to Self-Development: Stripe's Stablecoin Layout Advancement
The development of Tempo is a continuation of Stripe's stablecoin strategy. From acquiring infrastructure to self-developing underlying technology, its layout logic is clear and progressive.
Step One: Securing the Stablecoin Infrastructure Core - Bridge
In October 2024, Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for $1.1 billion, its largest acquisition to date.
Bridge allows enterprises and developers to seamlessly integrate stablecoin payments and supports convenient transfers between fiat currencies and stablecoins.
Bridge has attracted numerous customers, including SpaceX. For example, SpaceX uses Bridge to remit sales funds from Starlink in Argentina, Nigeria, and other markets. Mexican new bank DollarApp uses Bridge to help individuals receive USD payments from payroll services like Deel. Artim uses Bridge to pay employees across Latin America.
As Stripe co-founder John Collison stated in Stripe Sessions 2025 in May, "Stablecoins can truly enable borderless finance. By comparing the payment transaction growth in Stripe's first two years with Bridge's first two years, we can see that Bridge shows a more significant exponential growth trend, which also indirectly confirms the enormous potential of stablecoins."
Step Two: Connecting Offline Payment Scenarios and Launching Stablecoin Financial Accounts
On April 30th, Stripe's Bridge also partnered with Visa to launch a stablecoin card issuance product, allowing developers using Bridge to programmatically issue stablecoin-related Visa cards across multiple countries/regions through a single API.
Enterprises and individuals can use their stablecoin balances for daily shopping anywhere Visa is accepted. When a cardholder shops, Bridge deducts funds from their stablecoin balance and converts it to fiat currency, while merchants continue to receive payment in local currency.
After acquiring Bridge, Stripe officially announced the launch of stablecoin financial accounts on May 8th, aimed at providing more efficient and convenient cross-border payment and fund management solutions for global enterprises.
According to Stripe's official documentation, stablecoin financial accounts allow users to hold USDC and USDB stablecoin balances and send/receive funds through stablecoins and traditional financial channels (such as ACH, SEPA, and wire transfers), meaning stablecoin balance funds can be transferred to external bank accounts or crypto wallets. If the recipient is an external bank account, the received amount will be automatically converted based on the current exchange rate, greatly enhancing fund circulation convenience and flexibility. The technical support for this service also comes from Stripe's acquired Bridge platform.
Step Three: Completing User-End Entry - Privy
In June 2025, Stripe acquired embedded crypto wallet developer Privy.
Privy's identity verification and wallet infrastructure allows developers, projects, or companies to register wallets for users, launch self-custodial wallets, and securely sign transactions through app security. Privy simplifies cryptocurrency usage by embedding wallets in applications.
At the underlying level, Privy combines Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) with distributed key sharding to provide a seamless, secure, and scalable wallet.
Data published by Privy in June shows it has over 75 million accounts in more than 180 countries/regions, with monthly transaction volumes exceeding 85 million, totaling over 500 million RPC calls. Privy's customers include mainstream Crypto projects like Hyperliquid, Farcaster, Jupiter, Zora, pump.fun, and Blackbird.
Step Four: Self-Developing Underlying Blockchain - Tempo Closes the Loop
The development of Tempo is now an important piece of Stripe's stablecoin layout.
By self-developing a Layer1 blockchain, Stripe can control the core processing stage of stablecoin transactions, forming a complete closed loop with previous layouts: Bridge focuses on stablecoin infrastructure construction and enterprise integration, responsible for enterprise stablecoin integration and issuance; Privy provides user wallet entry; stablecoin financial accounts and Visa cards connect fund flow scenarios; Tempo carries underlying transaction processing.
Stripe's ultimate goal is to completely control the entire stablecoin payment process through the Tempo blockchain.
Stripe's Deeper Ambitions
Stripe's vast customer network provides a natural landing scenario for its stablecoin ecosystem.
According to the 2024 annual letter by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and co-founder John Collison in February, the total enterprise payment amount on the Stripe platform in 2024 reached $1.4 trillion, a year-on-year growth of 38%, equivalent to 1.3% of global GDP. Stripe firmly believes that technologies like stablecoins and artificial intelligence will inevitably reshape the economic landscape. The Stripe ecosystem covers every dimension of the economic landscape, from industry giants (half of the Fortune 100 use Stripe), to high-growth enterprises (80% of Forbes Cloud Computing Top 100 and 78% of Forbes AI 50 are Stripe customers), to emerging startups (one in six newly registered Delaware companies completes registration through Stripe Atlas).
Stripe previously stated that it is becoming the preferred platform for building stablecoin applications, already engaging in dialogues with multiple top global enterprises to help them develop stablecoin strategies, such as accelerating global expansion or simplifying fund custody.
If Stripe's stablecoin ecosystem fully takes shape, it may become a key hub for Web2 and Web3 financial integration, further consolidating its trillion-dollar payment empire status.
Stripe's ambition goes beyond improving payment efficiency. In its 2024 annual letter, it mentioned that stablecoins could become an "upgraded version of the Eurodollar" - just as the Eurodollar system provides offshore dollar services for non-US enterprises, stablecoins enable global dollar circulation with a lower threshold. Additionally, stablecoin issuers may become important buyers of US Treasury bonds, which will further promote the dollar's strong position.
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