Stripe in talks to acquire stablecoin-focused fintech firm: Bloomberg

Payment processing giant Stripe is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire the Sequoia-backed stablecoin money movement firm Bridge.

However, a final decision is yet to be made, and the parties could still pull out of the potential deal, Bloomberg reported , citing people familiar who asked not to be identified sharing private information.

Despite being one of the early pioneers of crypto, becoming the first major payments company to offer bitcoin support in 2014, Stripe wound down the feature in 2018, citing declining demand amid long confirmation times, higher fees and price volatility. However, last week, after a six-year wait, Stripe reintroduced crypto payments for U.S. businesses in the form of Circle’s USDC stablecoin on the Ethereum, Solana and Polygon networks.

It’s not the first time Stripe has integrated crypto services in recent months, as the firm seemingly looks to expand its integration with the sector. In July, the company’s EU arm enabled online vendors in the region to add a widget on their sites for users to purchase BTC, ETH and SOL, among other cryptocurrencies. A month earlier, Stripe also inked a partnership with Coinbase to incorporate the crypto exchange's Layer 2 network Base into its crypto payout products and enable users to use Stripe’s fiat-to-crypto onramp to buy digital assets with credit cards or Apple Pay inside the non-custodial Coinbase Wallet.

The Block reached out to Stripe and Bridge for comment.

What is Bridge?

Texas-based Bridge was co-founded by former executives from Square and Coinbase. Its global payment network is designed to integrate stablecoins like USDC and Tether’s USDT into the traditional financial system, and is aimed at enabling cross-border payments, payouts and foreign currency exchanges for businesses. Bridge has partnered with Bitso for business-to-business cross-border payments via stablecoin rails in Latin America.

In August, Bridge announced it had raised a total of $58 million from investors, including Sequoia, Ribbit, Index and Haun Ventures.

“Where traditional payment rails are too difficult, slow and expensive, some 30 million active users are now moving $3.2 trillion in stablecoins every month,” Sequoia said at the time. “And with industry giants including Stripe rolling out new payment options for these assets, those numbers are growing fast.”