Payments Giant Stripe Announces Plans To Start Testing Its Own Stablecoin

The payments giant Stripe is developing its own stablecoin and plans to start testing the asset soon.

Jennifer Lee, a product manager for Stripe Crypto, announced the news on Friday, asking companies outside the US to reach out if they were “interested in dollar access.”

Lee says the asset will be powered by Bridge, a stablecoin startup Stripe acquired in February.

Patrick Collison, Stripe’s chief executive, says his firm has “wanted to build this product for around a decade.” Earlier this year, he and his brother John Collison, the Stripe co-founders, wrote in the firm’s annual letter that stablecoins represent the future of money.

“Improvements to the basic usability of money make economies more prosperous. Consider the transitions from coins to banknotes, from the gold standard to fiat currency, and from paper instruments to electronic payments. Stablecoins are a new branch of the money tree. Such transitions occur with some regularity over the centuries, and the effects tend to be large.”

Stripe reemerged in the crypto sector last October when it rolled out support for USDC settlements on the Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and Polygon (POL) blockchains.

The payments giant previously enabled payments made using Bitcoin (BTC) until 2018, when the firm discontinued its support, citing BTC’s lack of utility as a payments rail.

The stablecoin development materializes as Stripe continues to grow, with the firm’s total payment volume surging to $1.4 trillion in 2024, a 38% increase year-on-year. That total represents 1.3% of the world’s total gross domestic product (GDP), per a press release from the company.

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