Stripe and the private equity group Advent International have offered $60.50 a share for PayPal (PYPL), valuing it at about $53bn, Reuters reported on 15 Jul. The bid carries a 28% premium to Tuesday's close and is backed by $50bn of committed bank financing. PayPal has not engaged with it.
Read as a payments deal, it is a discounted approach to a company whose stock has fallen 84% from its 2021 peak. Read as a stablecoin deal, it is something else: an attempt to buy the only dollar token with a consumer distribution network attached, by the company that already owns the infrastructure to issue it.
PayPal was trading at around $55 at 14:30UTC, up slightly on the opening price of $54.85, and 16% up on yesterday's close of $47.37.
What each side brings
Stripe spent $1.1bn on Bridge, the stablecoin issuance platform, in a deal announced in October 2024 and closed the following February. It remains the largest acquisition in the industry's history. Bridge issues its own dollar token, USDB, and runs an issuance-as-a-service model that lets other companies mint branded stablecoins on its regulatory and reserve infrastructure. It won conditional approval for a national trust bank charter in February. Stripe also incubated Tempo, a payments blockchain that reached mainnet in March, alongside the venture firm Paradigm.
PayPal has PYUSD, a token of roughly $3.4bn, and something Stripe cannot build: more than 400mn consumer accounts, plus Venmo.
PYUSD is issued by Paxos.
The awkward part
Bridge and Paxos compete. When the DeFi platform Hyperliquid chose an issuer for its USDH token, it picked Bridge over Paxos.
So Stripe's stablecoin arm has already taken a mandate from PayPal's stablecoin issuer, and now Stripe wants to buy PayPal. Bridge already supports PYUSD as one of four tokens its payments interface handles.
If the deal completes, Stripe would own both a stablecoin issuer and a stablecoin issued by that issuer's competitor. The question nobody has asked is what happens to the Paxos contract, and it is not a small one. PYUSD is Paxos's most visible partner-branded token.
Why it is not just a token
The prize is not PYUSD's $3.4bn. Measured against Tether and Circle, which hold more than 94% of a market above $300bn between them, PYUSD is a rounding error.
The prize is that PYUSD sits inside an app 400mn people already have. Every stablecoin issuer in the world is solving for distribution. PayPal has it and has not worked out what to do with it. Stripe has spent two years buying everything except that.
People familiar with the offer told the Financial Times a deal was unlikely at the price, with newly appointed chief executive Enrique Lores pursuing a turnaround. None of the companies involved have made public remarks concerning the potential deal.
