Last October, the payments giant Stripe announced a blockbuster $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge, a little-known startup focused on the dollar-backed cryptocurrencies known as stablecoins. Long a feature of the insular world of blockchain diehards, the technology had yet to break into Silicon Valley. But Stripe’s acquisition, alongside the thawing regulatory environment under the Trump administration, has catapulted stablecoins into the mainstream.
Almost a year after buying Bridge, Stripe is launching a product that will entail the $106 billion fintech further incorporating stablecoins into its core business—and potentially upending global payments. The new offering, announced on Tuesday, is called open issuance and will allow businesses to launch and manage their own stablecoins, including capturing the valuable yield earned off their reserves. Those reserves, typically consisting of U.S. Treasury bills and bank deposits, earn interest and ensure a stablecoin maintains a 1:1 peg to real-world dollars. Popular stablecoins such as Circle’s USDC and Tether don’t pass on the earnings to holders.
Like Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge, open issuance could be a major catalyst for driving stablecoin adoption by non-crypto businesses, though the early adopters are all blockchain firms.
“We are just really devout believers in the power of stablecoins to improve global money movement and storage,” said William Gaybrick, Stripe’s president of technology and business, in an interview with Fortune. “Open issuance is itself a very powerful lever to do that further.”
Stripe’s crypto gamble
Stripe grew into a Silicon Valley juggernaut by building payment processing software for online merchants and mobile apps, building essential infrastructure that enabled e-commerce. Crypto proponents have long argued that stablecoins represent the natural next step, facilitating near-instantaneous transactions with minuscule fees by using blockchain technology.
Still, the tumult of the crypto sector, and uncertain regulatory status of stablecoins, meant that many firms stayed away from the technology outside of limited pilots and marketing stunts. Even Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge in 2024 did not mean that the company would embrace stablecoins, especially because their value add would theoretically undercut Stripe’s business model of charging transaction fees. But the passage of the Genius Act, or legislation advanced by Congress and signed by President Trump in July that established a regulatory framework around stablecoins, created an unlock that made it easier for companies to begin experimenting with the space.
According to Zach Abrams, the cofounder of Bridge, all of the new Stripe-issued stablecoins will also be interoperable, which helps enable on-and-off ramping back into U.S. dollars, as well as allowing different companies to build integrations with each other across different blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, and eventually Stripe’s own project, Tempo. “The network builds liquidity together, and every additional participant benefits from and contributes to the shared liquidity that we’re all building,” he told Fortune.
For longtime crypto watchers, Stripe’s product represents a dramatic sea change in how companies approach stablecoin adoption and issuance. PayPal launching its own stablecoin PYUSD in 2023 took years of consideration and false starts. Now, with open issuance, any company can create their own, with Abrams predicting “dozens, if not hundreds” in the next few months. Gaybrick cited American Express and Amazon as two businesses that would benefit from allowing users to easily move between points, fiat currency, and stablecoins.
“For some of these major platforms or financial services companies,” he said, “If you’re storing balance or points on behalf of your consumers, or if you really want to store balance on behalf of your customers, stablecoins can be powerful.”
The perpetual question in crypto, however, is whether the technology will be able to attract blockchain outsiders. The first stablecoin launched through the new product is by Phantom, a crypto wallet company, and the other two announced companies that utilize Stripe’s open issuance are also crypto companies, Hyperliquid and Consensys’ Metamask.
Gaybrick acknowledged that he doesn’t know when stablecoins will be more widely adopted by non-crypto-native firms, but he said that open issuance is an important step in creating a better user experience. “Merchants, which are always our primary customer, are the ones who are going to onboard mainstream U.S. consumers,” he said.
