Author：Odaily 星球日报
Original article by Odaily (Planet Daily)@OdailyChina)
Author｜Wenser@wenser 2010)
On February 24, 2026, the global payments industry witnessed two significant "turning point events":
Firstly, Stripe announced that it would...$159 billionThe valuation has surged to $91.5 billion a year ago after a new round of takeover bids was completed, with Thrive Capital, Coatue, a16z, and other institutions jointly investing.74%On the same day, Stripe's two co-founders, Patrick and John Collison, released their 2025 annual letter, reviewing the Stripe platform.$1.9 trillionThe annual transaction volume increased by 34% year-on-year, accounting for approximately 1.6% of global GDP.
Secondly, there's the latest news about PayPal, the former payment giant: According to Bloomberg, PayPal is in talks with potential acquirers, and at least one major competitor is evaluating the acquisition. Following the news, PayPal's stock price surged during trading.9.7%It closed up by approximately5.76%It became the biggest gainer in the S&P 500 that day (Note from Odaily Planet Daily: even though all three major indices fell that day).
What's worth noting is that, according to a subsequent Bloomberg report, Stripe was considering acquiring all or part of PayPal's business. Interesting, isn't it? The former's advantage lies in its soaring valuation; while the latter's advantage is "finally, a big investor is willing to buy me."
This is not just an interlude in the story of the two payment giants, but more like a dividing line about "who sees the next era".
Stripe's Infinite Game: The "Funds Internet" Operating System
If your understanding of Stripe is still limited to "a company that makes payment APIs," then you are at least three years behind.
Looking back at Stripe's revenue in 2025, its achievements are undeniable: [Dow Jones Industrial Average]90%Companies in the Nasdaq 100 index80%Enterprises are using Stripe; almost all leading AI companies—OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), Cursor, Midjourney—use Stripe for their payment infrastructure; it's located in the heart of America's innovation hub.25% of newly registered companies in Delaware are created through Stripe Atlas (Note: a B2B company registration service platform).By 2025, 20% of Atlas startups will have completed their first payment within 30 days of launch, compared to only 8% five years ago.
The key driver behind these achievements is undoubtedly Stripe's deep strategic layout in the business lines of crypto payments and on-chain finance.
In their lengthy open letter, the Collison brothers wrote something that has forced the entire payments industry and even the crypto market to reflect deeply:"We may be in a crypto winter now, but it's definitely the summer of stablecoins."The data confirms this judgment—In 2025, the price of Bitcoin fell by about 50% from its peak, but the trading volume of stablecoins reached an unprecedented $34 trillion; the payment volume doubled to about $400 billion, of which about 60% came from B2B payment scenarios.
The reality is that by 2025, the data growth adopted by stablecoins will be officially decoupled from the price volatility of crypto assets.
Stripe had already placed a heavy bet before this turning point arrived:
In October 2024, it acquired stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for approximately $1.1 billion.This is the company's largest single acquisition ever, and Bridge's transaction volume has reached [amount missing] after the acquisition.More than 4 times growth;In July 2025, it acquired Privy, a cryptocurrency wallet infrastructure company.The latter supports more than110 million programmable wallets;
In September 2025, it partnered with Paradigm to incubate Tempo, a Layer 1 blockchain specifically designed for payments.,The mainnet officially launched in March 2026, supporting over 100,000 TPS and sub-second settlement. Visa, Shopify, Mastercard, Anthropic, OpenAI, Revolut, and others have already integrated with it.
In this way, Stripe has built its own stablecoin ecosystem—the stablecoin backend infrastructure Bridge, the wallet frontend application Privy, and the underlying settlement system Tempo—the three are intertwined, spanning the closed-loop ecosystem of stablecoin issuance, custody, and settlement.
Looking further ahead: Stripe also collaborated with OpenAI on...Intelligent Agent Business Protocol (ACP)launchedMachine Payments—This allows developers to directly charge the AI Agent API call fees, with settlements made via stablecoin micropayments. This is a payment scenario that has never existed before. Stripe's judgment is straightforward:When AI agents begin making purchasing decisions for humans, whoever controls the payment channels will seize the core lifeline of the AI economy.
Stripe's forward-thinking approach: Learning from the entire payments industry
Just look at the moves of its competitors to see how advanced Stripe's strategy is.
In March 2026, Mastercard announced its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK for up to $1.8 billion.This is Mastercard's largest acquisition to date in the digital asset space. Mastercard's Chief Product Officer, Jorn Lambert, put it bluntly: "We expect that over time, most financial institutions and fintech companies will offer digital currency services."
Note this phrase—"will provide." Stripe has already been providing it, and for a full year and a half. Here's the timeline of this battle for stablecoin infrastructure:
In October 2024, Stripe acquired Bridge;
In May 2025, Visa made a strategic investment in BVNK;
In 2025, Coinbase offered approximately $2 billion to acquire BVNK, but the deal ultimately fell through.
In March 2026, Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion. While the entire traditional payments industry was only scrambling to acquire this asset in 2026, Stripe had already bought it in 2024.
In addition, there is another interesting anecdote from the industry:Jack Zhang, founder of AirwallexPreviously revealedBack in 2018, Stripe attempted to acquire Airwallex with a $1.2 billion offer.At that time, Airwallex's annual revenue was only about $2 million, corresponding to a valuation of about 600 times its revenue. This means that in the field of cross-border payments, Stripe had already seen something that others had not yet seen as early as 2018.
Foresight is never a single correct judgment, but a continuous ability to perceive trends.
PayPal's Old Dilemma: When a Former Giant Lost Its Way in the New Age of Exploration
Let's look at PayPal next.
To summarize the rise of this former giant in one sentence: Born in 1998, before the dot-com bubble burst, PayPal quickly became the standard payment solution for eBay and an early pioneer in internet finance. But the more glorious the history, the more brutal the present reality becomes.PayPal is completely stalling, and it's stalling right where it used to be most proud.
PayPal's net revenue for the entire year of 2025$33.2 billiongrowth rate only4.3%This represents a continued decline, lower than the 6.8% growth in 2024. Core direct checkout business saw only [a certain percentage] growth for the year.4%By Q4, it had fallen to1%This represents a precipitous drop from 7% a year ago—a figure reflecting the comprehensive encroachment of Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, and Adyen on PayPal's core market share. The number of transactions per active account in Q4 decreased year-over-year.5%The total number of active accounts is439 millionThey remained stationary in the vicinity.
In February 2026, after the release of the Q4 financial report, the stock price plummeted by over [amount missing] in a single day.20%CEO Alex Chriss subsequently resigned, and Enrique Lores took over as CEO on March 1. Management's statement in the conference call was: "Our execution has not reached the required level."
PYUSD was once PayPal's biggest gamble in its attempt to enter the on-chain world, but reality has given it a harsh slap in the face: launched in August 2023, its current market capitalization is still less than [amount missing].$4 billionInsufficient market share0.5%It is almost negligible compared to USDT and USDC, and its market value is even less than that of USD1, a newcomer.
Until recently, after nearly three years, PayPal finally expanded PYUSD to approximately [number missing] globally.70 markets—This move itself is not wrong, but in a race where competitors have been making rapid progress for nearly two years, the advantage of getting ahead is meaningless.
Even more fatal is that PayPal's "early start, late finish" reflects a fundamental contradiction hidden beneath its surface business:PayPal's business model relies on "transaction fees," while stablecoins rely on "earning interest from government bonds by storing assets."There is an inherent conflict between the two sets of logics—every time PayPal promotes a PYUSD stablecoin payment, it is actually eroding its traditional transaction fee revenue to some extent.
This problem is difficult to solve within PayPal's existing business framework.
The battle between the old and new "payment kings": Who is building new infrastructure and who is repairing old pipelines?
Looking at the two companies side by side, the turning point in their destinies did not lie in a particular product decision, but in their drastically different answers to the question of "what is the next step in payments".
PayPal's answer is to improve its existing payment services. The monetization of Venmo, the BNPL business, and the expansion of PYUSD are not inherently problematic, but they are all repairs within the existing framework, rather than bets on the next paradigm.
When stablecoins emerged, PayPal's response was, "Let's issue a stablecoin too"; but when the AI wave arrived, PayPal's response was, "Let's add a more convenient and faster function button to the checkout page."
A leaf before the eyes obscures Mount Tai. PayPal's downfall may have been inevitable when management and the entire company chose to maintain the status quo rather than pursue disruptive innovation.
In contrast, Stripe has never been confined to existing standard answers, but has always been pursuing better solutions.
Faced with the question of "the future state of payments," Stripe's answer is to redefine payments themselves: starting with seven lines of code for receiving payments, it has built stablecoin orchestration (Bridge), crypto wallets (Privy), payment-specific blockchain (Tempo), and AI intelligent agent business protocol (ACP) – each step is not about grabbing market share in the existing payments market, but about building the foundation for the next era of finance and payments.
The Collison brothers in2025 Annual Summary Open LetterLi wrote:Our best guess is that the acceleration in 2025 marks the beginning of a larger inflection point in entrepreneurship and creativity driven by large language models.
Behind this statement lies a clear-headed judgment—they are not just operating a payment company, but laying the financial foundation for the next internet era.
In their view, the entire industry will eventually move towards on-chain payments, stablecoin settlements, and AI agent economics—a point on which there is little debate. The only difference lies in:Who is building this road, and who is waiting for it to be completed before coming up?
Stripe chose the former, and almost two years earlier than its competitors. PayPal is now in a situation where it is a large company with healthy cash flow, but it is a step behind in terms of the times—it is not without its trump cards to turn things around, but the window of opportunity for it is narrowing.
Of course, we must acknowledge that PayPal is not a "bad company." It boasts 439 million active accounts, Venmo's social payment DNA, nearly $2 trillion in annual transaction volume, and a business model that continues to generate real cash flow. However, in the new era of payments, these assets are more like a trump card that needs to be reactivated than an impregnable moat.
Throughout history, every shift in technological paradigms has swept away a large number of "taken-for-granted giants" into the dustbin of history. PayPal now faces precisely such a crucial question: Will it continue to be a seemingly better but ultimately stagnant PayPal, or will it strive to become the next era's payment infrastructure?
The answer determines destiny.
Recommended reading:
Stripe's 2025 Annual Letter (Official Text)
Stripe Official Press Release: Tender Offer and Annual Update
Stripe is building the Tempo blockchain.
Stripe is considering acquiring PayPal.
Mastercard to acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion
PayPal Q4 2025 financial report, CEO resignation
In-depth analysis of PayPal's 2025 performance
Airwallex founder reveals he rejected Stripe's $1.2 billion acquisition offer.
