Stripe CEO Patrick Collison has confirmed on X that the company has acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, describing stablecoins as ‘room-temperature superconductors for financial services.”
The news follows an earlier tweet by Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, that the deal price was $1.1 billion.
Bridge provides B2B stablecoin infrastructure to help companies to support payments using stablecoins. As we noted in a more detailed piece last week, both companies are global orchestrators, Stripe with card and bank payments and Bridge with stablecoins.
The startup developed infrastructure enabling developers to create applications that support instant cross border payments.
In a social media post today, Bridge CEO Zach Abrams wrote about the launch of its APIs in March 2023.
“After launch, we quickly saw inbound interest from cross-border payments companies. People talked about stablecoins for x-border money movement, but we didn’t understand the space or need.”
“These developers onboarded, showed us what was possible, and Bridge quickly started to scale.”
“After that, we had government entities onboard with us to disburse aid, fintechs build US dollar-based savings and spending products, SpaceX to manage their global treasury, and many others.”
He added that the company moves billions in stablecoin volumes and has grown ten fold this year.
As we noted in last week’s article, for a young startup like Bridge, it’s not just about cashing out. It’s also the ability for founders to make their vision come to life faster with the reach of a company like Stripe.
So far stablecoins have been mainly used for crypto and by people in economies with unstable currencies. Bridge was one of the companies likely to help stablecoins go mainstream. The timeframe just got shorter.
If banks want to compete with tokenized deposits, they may need to move faster.
Ledger Insights Research has published a report on bank-issued stablecoins and tokenized deposits featuring more than 70 projects. Find out more here.
