What makes Stripe up and PayPal down?
Author: Odailey Planet Daily
Original title: Stripe up, PayPal down: The new king of payments ascends to the throne
On February 24, 2026, the global payments industry ushered in two landmark “turnaround events”:
First, Stripe announced a new round of takeovers at a valuation of $159 billion, with joint funding from Thrive Capital, Coatue, a16z and other institutions, which surged 74% from the $91.5 billion valuation a year ago. On the same day, two of Stripe's co-founders, Patrick and John Collison, released an open letter for 2025, reviewing the $1.9 trillion annual transaction volume on the Stripe platform — an increase of 34% year over year, accounting for about 1.6% of global GDP.
Second, there is the latest news from PayPal, the “old payment hegemon”: According to Bloomberg, PayPal is approaching a potential buyer, and at least one major competitor is evaluating this acquisition. As soon as the news came out, PayPal's stock price soared 9.7% intraday, and closed up about 5.76%, making it the biggest increase in the S&P 500 stock of the day (Daily Planet Daily note: even though the three major indices fell across the board).
It's worth checking out that, according to subsequent Bloomberg news, Stripe is considering buying all or part of PayPal's business. Isn't it fun? The advantage of the former is that valuations have skyrocketed; the advantage of the latter is that “finally, big money owners are willing to buy me.”
This is not just a story episode between the two major payment giants, but more like a dividing line about “who sees the next era.”
Stripe's Infinite Gaming: The “Internet of Money” Operating System
If you're still thinking of Stripe as “a company that makes payment APIs,” it's at least three years behind.
Looking back at Stripe's business revenue in 2025, its results are obvious to all: 90% of companies in the Dow and 80% of companies in the Nasdaq 100 Index use Stripe; almost all leading AI companies — OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), Cursor, Midjourney — all have Stripe's receipt infrastructure; 25% of Delaware's newly registered companies known as the “Heart of American Innovation” have passed Stripe Atlas (Daily: 2B's company registration service platform) was founded. In 2025, 20% of Atlas startups completed their first fee within 30 days of establishment, compared to only 8% in 5 years.
An important driving force behind these achievements is undoubtedly Stripe's deep layout in the business line of crypto payments and on-chain finance.
In their long open letter, the Collison brothers wrote a phrase that made the entire payment industry and even the crypto market have to ponder: “We may have entered the crypto winter now, but it is definitely the summer of stablecoins.” The data confirms this judgment — in 2025, the price of Bitcoin fell by about 50% from its high point, but stablecoin trading volume reached an unprecedented $34 trillion; payments doubled to about $400 billion, of which about 60% came from the B2B payment scenario.
The reality is that in 2025, data growth in stablecoin adoption was officially decoupled from price fluctuations in crypto assets.
Stripe was already betting heavily before this inflection point was reached:
In October 2024, it acquired the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for approximately $1.1 billion, the largest single acquisition in the company's history. After the acquisition, Bridge's trading volume increased more than 4 times; in July 2025, it acquired the crypto wallet infrastructure company Privy, which supports more than 110 million programmable wallets;
In September 2025, it cooperated with Paradigm to incubate Tempo, a layer 1 blockchain created specifically for payments. The main network was officially launched in March 2026, supporting more than 100,000 TPS, sub-second settlement, Visa, Shopify, Mastercard, Anthropic, OpenAI, Revolut, etc.
In this way, Stripe has built its own stablecoin ecosystem — the stablecoin backend infrastructure Bridge, the front-end wallet application Privy, and the underlying settlement system Tempo — all three are interlaced, spanning a closed-loop ecosystem of stablecoin issuance, hosting, and settlement.
Looking further: Stripe has also co-developed an intelligent commercial agreement (ACP) with OpenAI, and launched Machine Payments (Machine Payments) — which allows developers to charge API calls directly to AI agents for settlement using stablecoin micropayments. This is a payment scenario that has never existed before. Stripe's judgment is straightforward: when AI agents start making purchasing decisions for humans, whoever controls the payment channel first grasps the lifeblood of the AI economy.
Stripe's forward-looking vision: copying jobs across the payments industry
You can see how advanced Stripe's layout is, just look at the actions of its peers.
In March 2026, Mastercard announced the acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, the largest acquisition ever by Mastercard in the digital asset sector. Mastercard's Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert put it bluntly: “We expect most financial institutions and fintech companies to provide digital currency services over time.”
Note the sentence — “will be provided”. Stripe is already offering it, and it's been available for a full year and a half. The timeline for this stablecoin infrastructure grab is here:
In October 2024, Stripe acquired Bridge;
Visa strategically took a stake in BVNK in May 2025;
In 2025, Coinbase negotiated the acquisition of BVNK at a price of about 2 billion US dollars, but in the end, the talks went bankrupt;
In March 2026, Mastercard took over BVNK for $1.8 billion. The entire traditional payments industry only began rushing to make up this ticket in 2026, and Stripe already bought it in 2024.
Also, there is an interesting industry fact: Jack Zhang, founder of Airwallex (Airwallex)It was previously revealedAs early as 2018, Stripe tried to buy Airwallex at a price of $1.2 billion — at the time, Airwallex's annual revenue was only about $2 million, and the corresponding valuation was about 600 times the revenue. This means that when it comes to cross-border payments, Stripe has seen things that others haven't seen as early as 2018.
Foresight is never a correct judgment; it is a continuous ability to sense trends.
PayPal's Old Dilemma: When the Old Overlords Get Lost in the Age of New Sailing
Let's take another look at PayPal.
Summarize the history of this former giant in one sentence: In 1998, PayPal was born in the golden age where the internet bubble had not yet burst, and quickly became the standard payment standard for eBay e-commerce and the early founder of internet finance. But the more glorious the history, the harsher the current reality: PayPal is completely stalling, and the location where it has stalled is exactly where it used to be most proud.
Throughout 2025, PayPal's net revenue was US$33.2 billion, a growth rate of only 4.3%, down from 6.8% in 2024, and continued to decline. The core direct checkout business grew by only 4% throughout the year, falling to 1% in Q4, a cliff-style drop from 7% a year ago — behind this figure is the complete encroachment of PayPal's core territory by Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, and Adyen. Q4 The number of transactions per active account decreased by 5% year over year, and the total number of active accounts remained at around 439 million.
In February 2026, after the Q4 earnings report was released, the stock price plummeted by more than 20% in a single day. CEO Alex Chriss immediately left office, and the new CEO Enrique Lores took over on March 1. The management stated during the conference call: “Our execution is not at the level we should have.”
The PYUSD card used to be PayPal's biggest bet to enter the chain world, but reality gave it a hard slap: launched in August 2023, the current market capitalization is less than $4 billion, less than 0.5% of the market share, and is almost negligible in front of USDT and USDC, and even USD1, the latecomer's market capitalization.
Until recently, after nearly 3 years, PayPal was able to expand PYUSD to around 70 markets around the world—that's fine in itself, but on a racetrack where rivals have been raging for almost two years, there's no point in getting a head start.
What is more fatal is that the reflection behind PayPal's “early morning and late” is a fundamental contradiction hidden under its surface business: PayPal's business model survives by “capital flow fees,” while the stablecoin business model relies on “accumulated assets eating interest on treasury bonds.” There is a natural conflict between the two sets of logics—every time PayPal promotes a PYUSD stablecoin payment, it is, to some extent, eating away at its traditional fee revenue.
This question is difficult to solve in PayPal's current business framework.
The dispute between the old and the new “king of payments”: Who is building new infrastructure and who is repairing old pipelines?
Looking at the two companies together, the point of divergence of fate is not a specific product decision, but rather a completely different answer to the question “what is the next step in payment”.
PayPal's answer is to make existing payment services better. Venmo's monetization, BNPL business, PYUSD expansion, these moves are fine in and of themselves, but they are all patching within an existing framework rather than betting on the next paradigm.
When stablecoins appeared, PayPal's reaction was “Let's also issue a stablecoin”; when the AI wave arrived, PayPal's reaction was to “add a more convenient and faster function button to the checkout page.”
I can't see Mount Taro because of the one-leaf barrier. PayPal's failure may have been doomed when management and the company as a whole chose to keep up rather than disruptively innovate.
Stripe, on the other hand, has never been limited to existing standard answers; instead, it's always looking for better solutions.
Faced with the “future state of payments,” the answer given by Stripe is to redefine payment itself: starting with seven-line code collection, and building a stablecoin orchestration (Bridge), crypto wallet (Privy), dedicated payment blockchain (Tempo), and AI intelligent commerce agreement (ACP) — each step is not seizing share of the existing payment market, but rather building the foundation for the next financial and payment era.
The Collison brothers are in2025 Annual Summary Open LetterLi wrote, “Our best guess is that the acceleration in 2025 is the beginning of a greater inflection point for entrepreneurship and creativity driven by the big language model.”
Behind this statement is a kind of clear judgment—they have never operated just a payment company, but are laying the financial foundation for the next Internet era.
In their opinion, the entire industry will eventually move in the direction of on-chain payments, stablecoin settlement, and the AI Agent economy. There is not much controversy about this. The only difference is who is building this road, and who is waiting for the road to be built before going up.
Stripe chose the former, and it's almost two years earlier than its peers. PayPal's current situation is a company with a huge size, healthy cash flow, but is half slow in terms of the trend of the times — it's not that it doesn't have a bottom card, but the time window left for it is narrowing.
Of course, we have to be sure that PayPal isn't a “bad company,” with 439 million active accounts, Venmo's social payments gene, close to $2 trillion in annual transactions, and a business model that is still generating real cash flows. But in the new payment era, these assets are more like a bottom card that needs to be reactivated than a moat that is as strong as gold.
Every time the technological paradigm shift in history, a large number of “natural giants” have been swept into the dust of history. What PayPal is facing now is a test question that must be answered: Will you continue to be a seemingly better and self-proclaimed PayPal, or will you forge ahead and become the payment infrastructure for the next era?
The answer determines fate.
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