Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have reportedly made a joint offer to buy PayPal at a valuation topping $53 billion—a combination that, if completed, would concentrate significant stablecoin infrastructure under a single owner.
The Offer on the Table
According to Reuters, Stripe and Advent offered $60.50 per share, roughly a 28% premium to PayPal’s closing price on Tuesday, in a bid backed by about $50 billion in committed bank financing.
Under the proposal, the two suitors would jointly own PayPal in equal stakes and would not break up the company. The offer was reportedly submitted earlier this month, following an initial approach in April. The people describing the talks cautioned there is no certainty a deal will result.
The financial logic is straightforward. PayPal’s market value peaked near $360 billion in 2021 and fell to roughly $36 billion this year, losing more than 40% over the past twelve months, making a once-dominant payments pioneer an acquisition target. For Stripe, PayPal would add a recognized consumer brand, Venmo, and a base of roughly 400 million users to its business-focused infrastructure.
Why This Is a Stablecoin Story
Beneath the payments headline sits a digital-dollar one. Both companies have become serious stablecoin players, and a merger would unite two of the most significant non-issuer positions in the market.
Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge for $1.1 billion—the largest crypto acquisition on record—added the wallet firm Privy, and incubated a payments blockchain, Tempo, with Paradigm. Most consequentially, Stripe is a founding backer of Open USD, the consortium stablecoin unveiled in June by more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, and BlackRock, and has signaled it will make OUSD the default stablecoin for businesses on its platform.
PayPal, for its part, issues PYUSD, a dollar-backed stablecoin launched in 2023 through Paxos. With a market capitalization around $2.8 billion, PYUSD ranks among the larger stablecoins, is GENIUS Act-compliant, and recently went live natively on Polygon after expanding to 70 countries.
A combined entity would therefore hold OUSD’s most important distribution backer and an established, federally regulated stablecoin issuer at once—a concentration of stablecoin reach that sits outside both Tether and Circle.
The PYUSD Question
That concentration raises an unresolved question: what happens to PYUSD inside a company whose acquirer is building its future around a rival token?
Stripe’s stablecoin strategy points toward OUSD. The consortium is designed to return most reserve income to participants, and Stripe has positioned it as the default for its platform merchants. PayPal’s PYUSD, by contrast, is a single-issuer token whose economics accrue through PayPal and Paxos. On paper, the two are competitors for the same enterprise and cross-border payment flows.
Several outcomes are possible, and none is confirmed. A combined company could keep PYUSD as a consumer-facing token inside PayPal and Venmo while steering enterprise volume toward OUSD, running the two in parallel for different segments. It could fold PYUSD’s distribution into the broader OUSD network over time, using Bridge’s Open Issuance infrastructure to bridge them. Or it could maintain both indefinitely, treating PYUSD’s 400-million-user reach as too valuable to disturb.
Bridge’s own design offers a clue rather than an answer. The platform already supports one-for-one swaps between stablecoins, including PYUSD, which would make interoperability between the two tokens technically straightforward. Whether the strategy favors coexistence or consolidation is a decision that would fall to the merged entity, and it has not been signaled.
For now, the question is hypothetical. PayPal has not accepted the offer, and any integration decisions would follow a transaction that may not happen.
A Market Already in Motion
The reported bid lands amid a wave of stablecoin consolidation among payment giants. Mastercard agreed to acquire infrastructure provider BVNK for up to $1.8 billion; Visa has expanded USDC settlement across its network; and the OUSD consortium itself represents an attempt by more than 140 firms to challenge the Tether-Circle duopoly that controls over 80% of the roughly $310 billion stablecoin market.
A Stripe-PayPal tie-up would be the largest move yet in that contest, pairing infrastructure, issuance, and distribution at a scale no single stablecoin challenger has assembled. Whether it materializes now rests with PayPal, which has the offer in hand and, so far, has said nothing.
