Stripe Confirms Plans to Acquire Stablecoin Platform Bridge

(Bloomberg) -- Stripe Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Patrick Collison confirmed in a X post on Monday that the payments company plans to buy stablecoin startup Bridge. 

The deal, first reported by Bloomberg News on Oct. 16, is still subject to regulatory approvals and closing conditions. The parties expect to close in coming months, according to a separate post from Bridge’s X account. Stripe will pay $1.1 billion, Forbes reported. A spokesperson for Stripe declined to comment on a purchase amount.  

“Stablecoins are room-temperature superconductors for financial services,” Collison wrote on X. “Thanks to stablecoins, businesses around the world will benefit from significant speed, coverage, and cost improvements in the coming years. Stripe is going to build the world’s best stablecoin infrastructure.” 

Bridge is co-founded by Coinbase veterans Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, who sold a previous startup, Evenly, to Square. The San Antonio, Texas-based company helps businesses create, store, send and accept stablecoins like USDT from Tether Holdings and Circle Internet Financial’s USDC. Bridge launched in March of last year and onboarded cross-border payment companies, governments looking for new ways to disburse aid and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which uses the platform to manage their global treasury. 

Stablecoins are typically designed to track the value of currencies or assets such as dollars one-for-one and today are primarily used as bridge currencies in and out of the crypto economy.

“We proved to ourselves and to those outside the company that stablecoins could become core global money movement infrastructure,” a Bridge post announcing the deal states. “This happened not because consumers or businesses inherently want “crypto”, but instead because stablecoins solve critical financial problems.”

The acquisition accelerates Stripe’s recent moves into stablecoins, an increasingly popular alternative payments mechanism. Earlier this month, Stripe said it would once again allow merchants in the US to accept crypto payments in the form of USDC after a six-year hiatus from processing digital tokens. 

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