Stripe to expand stablecoin cards to 100 countries as crypto payments strategy grows

The company has issued more than 400 million cards and processed hundreds of billions of dollars in card volume since 2018, Stern said. Its stablecoin offering combines that issuing business with Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe bought for $1.1 billion in 2024.

For a company such as Ramp, that could mean taking a corporate card into new countries using stablecoins instead of rebuilding banking and payments connections market by market. Kraken, meanwhile, has explored letting customers spend from accounts where they already hold digital assets.

Stripe has been assembling the pieces for a broader blockchain payments push. After buying Bridge and Privy, it also partnered with crypto investment firm Paradigm to develop Tempo, a blockchain designed for payments. Stripe is also a founding investor in Open Standard, the company developing Open USD, a stablecoin that aims to challenge Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT. Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams recently moved to run Open Standard full time.

Stern said those products are meant to work closely together without locking customers into Stripe’s ecosystem.

“If you’re using Stripe, Bridge, Privy, Tempo, Open USD, it should be absolutely amazing, and it should feel like these systems were built to exist together,” he said.