coindesk.com
Global payments firm Stripe is expanding its stablecoin cards business globally, betting that digital dollars can become another way for consumers and businesses to pay alongside traditional currencies.
Henri Stern, CEO and co-founder of crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy acquired last year by Stripe, has taken on an additional role overseeing stablecoins and crypto across Stripe, the company told CoinDesk.
Stripe expects its stablecoin card programs to more than 100 countries by year-end, Stern told CoinDesk in an interview. Current customers include crypto exchange Kraken, fintech Ramp and payments app Morse.
The expansion comes as stablecoin cards emerge as a fast-growing corner of the $300 billion-plus digital dollar market. About $1.2 billion of stablecoins were spent through cards last month, according to Paymentscan, triple the amount a year earlier. That's still a fraction of the global card payments market, but points to stablecoins are increasingly being used beyond crypto trading and cross-border transfers into everyday purchases.
Stablecoins as payments alternative, not replacement
Stripe's approach is to plug them into infrastructure it already has, Stern told CoinDesk.
The company has issued more than 400 million cards and processed hundreds of billions of dollars in card volume since 2018, Stern said. Its stablecoin offering combines that issuing business with Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe bought for $1.1 billion in 2024.
For a company such as Ramp, that could mean taking a corporate card into new countries using stablecoins instead of rebuilding banking and payments connections market by market. Kraken, meanwhile, has explored letting customers spend from accounts where they already hold digital assets.
Stripe has been assembling the pieces for a broader blockchain payments push. After buying Bridge and Privy, it also partnered with crypto investment firm Paradigm to develop Tempo, a blockchain designed for payments. Stripe is also a founding investor in Open Standard, the company developing Open USD, a stablecoin that aims to challenge Circle's USDC and Tether's USDT. Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams recently moved to run Open Standard full time.
Stern said those products are meant to work closely together without locking customers into Stripe's ecosystem.
“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,” he said.
