Bridge Acquired by Stripe
Bridge, a stablecoin platform, has been acquired by payments company Stripe in a $1.1 billion transaction, which is the most significant acquisition in the crypto industry to date. Michael Arrington, the proprietor of Techcrunch, verified the news in a post on X, underscoring the importance of this milestone agreement. Stripe’s increasing dedication to cryptocurrency is evidenced by its acquisition of Bridge. Bridge provides software that enables businesses to accept payments in stablecoins, thereby enabling Stripe to expand its presence in the digital asset space. This transaction underscores the growing convergence between conventional finance and digital currencies, as it represents the largest acquisition in the history of the cryptocurrency industry. It has the potential to indicate a more widespread adoption of stablecoin-based solutions within conventional financial services.
Stripe, which was valued at $70 billion in July, is headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin. This acquisition would be the company’s most significant to date. It would also be one of the most significant acquisitions in the history of cryptocurrency. A request for comment was not promptly addressed by Bridge. Stripe responded to Cointelegraph; however, it did not issue a formal statement. Stripe is a payment processing platform that enables businesses to collect credit and debit cards, as well as other forms of payment, online.
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What the Industry has to say about this?
In March, it was reported that the total payment volume in 2023 had surpassed $1 trillion, with the output of businesses using Stripe accounting for approximately 1% of the global gross domestic product (GDP). John Collison, the company’s co-founder, announced that the company would commence facilitating global stablecoin payments “this summer” just six months prior to the reported deal.
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Additionally, it occurs less than two weeks after Stripe implemented stablecoin payments on its primary payments user interface by incorporating Circle USD (USDC) stablecoin. Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, two former executives of Coinbase, established Bridge in 2022 as a stablecoin-based payments network to compete with the SWIFT network and credit cards. As the director of consumer at Coinbase, Abrams founded Evenly, a peer-to-peer payments company that Square ultimately acquired. Yu has held engineering positions at Coinbase, Square, Doordash, and Airbnb. Some have referred to Bridge as the Web3 equivalent of Stripe, as it enables businesses to generate, store, transmit, and receive stablecoins. Sequoia, Ribbit, Index, and other investors contributed $58 million to the organization this year.
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