Stripe, Advent International Bid $53 Billion for PayPal in a Stablecoin Infrastructure Play

Payments company Stripe and private equity firm Advent International submitted a joint offer of $60.50 per share to acquire PayPal, valuing the company at more than $53 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. PayPal’s board is expected to meet as soon as July 20 to discuss the unsolicited offer, which has renewed questions over which company would control key payments infrastructure going forward.

A Joint Offer, Not a Solo Stripe Deal

The bid, submitted earlier this month, represents a 28% premium over PayPal’s Tuesday closing price and is backed by roughly $50 billion in committed bank financing. Under the proposed structure, Stripe and Advent would jointly own PayPal on an equal basis rather than Stripe acquiring the company outright. 

The pursuit is not new: Advent and Stripe first approached PayPal in April, and Stripe had reportedly considered a bid as early as February. Neither PayPal, Stripe nor Advent has publicly commented on the offer.

PayPal brings more than 400 million active consumer accounts to any potential combination, along with its Venmo mobile payment service and one of the most recognizable checkout brands in the industry. Combined with Stripe’s merchant network, the deal would unite consumer reach with merchant acceptance at a scale few payments companies can match.

Stripe’s Stablecoin Buildout Predates the Bid

Stripe has spent recent years building out its own stablecoin infrastructure independent of any PayPal deal. The company acquired stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2024 and launched its own blockchain network, Tempo, in 2025. Stripe is also a member of Open USD, a stablecoin consortium that includes Coinbase, Mastercard, Visa and BlackRock and is built to compete with Circle’s USDC.

That existing buildout raises questions about the future of PYUSD, PayPal’s dollar-backed stablecoin, which is issued by Paxos rather than by PayPal itself and currently ranks as the eighth-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

Analysts Say Infrastructure, Not a Single Token, Is the Real Prize

Torab Torabi, chief executive of stablecoin infrastructure firm Movement Labs, argued that the more important question is not which stablecoin brand wins out but who controls the settlement infrastructure underneath it. Torabi said:

“The name on the front of the wallet means far less than whose infrastructure clears the payment behind it.” 

Louisa Bai, head of stablecoins at Mysten Labs, made a similar point, arguing that if Stripe owns PayPal, its Bridge platform would become the shared infrastructure layer underneath PYUSD, Open USD and Tempo alike. She described that outcome as infrastructure consolidation rather than a simple contest between competing tokens.

Analysts Split on PYUSD’s Fate

Commentators disagree on how aggressively Stripe might steer PayPal’s user base toward its own ecosystem. James Brownlee, chief executive of institutional payments platform t-0, said he expects PYUSD holders to eventually be offered incentives to swap into Open USD. He said Stripe has little reason to keep paying Paxos for issuance when Bridge can handle it internally. 

Torabi took the opposite view, arguing that PayPal’s real value lies in its existing regulated dollar reach across tens of millions of users worldwide, reach he said would be counterproductive to switch off immediately after paying billions to acquire it.

Limited Near-Term Threat to Tether and USDC

Even a combined Stripe-PayPal stablecoin push is unlikely to meaningfully dent the roughly 84% combined market share Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC currently hold, according to CoinGecko data. Bai said Tether and Circle’s advantage rests on liquidity depth and years of exchange listings that a newly consolidated infrastructure push could not quickly replicate, adding that any competitive pressure would likely fall hardest on smaller, mid-tier stablecoins rather than the two market leaders.