The changing of the guard in the payment industry: Stripe, a unicorn worth hundreds of billions, may acquire PayPal, heavily investing in stablecoins and AI.

Author: Nancy, PANews

PayPal, the pioneer of payments, may be acquired, with the rumored buyer being Stripe, a payment upstart that has not yet gone public.

Two representative companies of the Internet era, with two completely different payment strategies, have now gone down different paths: one has ushered in a high valuation of $159 billion, while the other has entered a long revaluation cycle after the spotlight fades.

To date, this upstart has yet to ring the Nasdaq bell, choosing to retain the strategic freedom of not being listed, and is accelerating its bets on stablecoins and AI, investing heavily in a completely new financial track.

A turning point in the payment industry: Rumors circulate that the company is planning to acquire PayPal, the pioneer of the industry.

In the global payments landscape, the winds of change are quietly shifting.

According to Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter, Stripe has expressed initial interest in a potential acquisition of PayPal or its assets and is considering acquiring all or part of the company's assets.

Just recently, Stripe President John Collison stated in an interview, "PayPal has had a very tough few years. The market landscape has changed dramatically, with the rise of companies like Apple Pay and Google Pay. I can't speculate on any mergers and acquisitions, but they have certainly gone through a difficult period." This assessment has fueled acquisition rumors.

PayPal's story is an epitome of the first generation of internet finance.

Originating in the eBay era, PayPal became the absolute infrastructure of global cross-border payments, creating a payment empire with a peak market value of $360 billion. The PayPal Mafia (represented by figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Reid Hoffman) profoundly influenced the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. However, times have changed. With stagnant growth in active users, executive turmoil, and strong competition from rivals, the stock price of this behemoth has plummeted, its market share has shrunk, and the capital market's imagination for its future potential is rapidly shrinking.

Compared to the slow and hesitant steps of its predecessors, Stripe, founded in 2010, seized the golden window of opportunity presented by the mobile internet boom and the SaaS startup wave. With its minimalist experience of "integrating payments with just a few lines of code," Stripe quickly gained traction, growing from an initial payment API tool into a full-stack infrastructure giant covering global payments, revenue growth, fund management, and compliance.

Today, this invisible money-printing machine is one of the world's most valuable and fastest-growing private technology companies.

According to Stripe's 2025 annual letter, its services cover more than 5 million businesses, and the total payment volume processed last year reached $1.9 trillion, equivalent to about 1.6% of global GDP. This rising star recently launched an internal share buyback program with a staggering valuation of $159 billion, while its former leader, PayPal, currently has a market capitalization of only about $54 billion.

Like the Yangtze River, the new generation surpasses the old. If this acquisition is ultimately completed, it may become one of the most iconic cases in Silicon Valley history.

With over 400 million active accounts and assets like Venmo and Braintree, popular money transfer tools among young Americans, Stripe will complete its consumer-facing offerings and enhance its competitiveness in the payment processing market once these assets are acquired. Furthermore, PayPal's USD stablecoin, PYUSD, aligns perfectly with Stripe's ongoing crypto strategy.

For Stripe, this acquisition may not only be an expansion of scale, but also a key strategic move to fill the gap from infrastructure to traffic entry point.

Stripe, with its deep pockets, rings the bell late.

Stripe, with its continuously rising valuation and sound financial condition, has no plans for an IPO in the short term.

Although Stripe has long been ready to go public and has hired major investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to advise on its future listing plans, it has never pressed the listing button, which is out of step with the capital market's accelerated listing wave in recent years.

Stripe’s confidence stems directly from its sound financial position.

Unlike many companies that go public due to financing needs, Stripe is already profitable and has a stable positive cash flow. The funds needed for daily operations, expansion, and mergers and acquisitions can be obtained through its own cash generation capabilities and private equity financing. As for the monetization needs of early investors and employees, it provides phased exit channels through periodic tender offers and secondary market share transfers, enabling partial monetization without a public listing. This reduces the urgency of an IPO to some extent.

More importantly, there is the strategic space that private identity brings.

According to Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, publicly traded companies typically need to prioritize "harvests," while remaining private means they can invest more resources and time in infrastructure development and long-term investments, focusing their energy on customers and products rather than quarterly financial reports and forecasting.

Over the past six years, Stripe has consistently allocated a higher percentage of its revenue to R&D than most of its peers. In 2025 alone, Stripe released over 350 product updates. Simultaneously, Stripe has built a competitive moat through acquisitions and ecosystem expansion; for example, its acquisition of Metronome is expected to generate $1 billion in annualized revenue this year.

This logic is particularly important at the current stage of development. Stripe is still in an expansion cycle and needs to continue to increase investment in R&D, product innovation, strategic acquisitions, and global expansion. In particular, the high-investment, long-cycle, and highly uncertain sectors such as AI and stablecoins, which are being rapidly developed, may not necessarily translate into profits in the short term.

If the company were to go public at this time, its strategic pace would inevitably be influenced by the financial reporting cycle, and the periodic fluctuations in profits might be amplified and misinterpreted. The ups and downs in market sentiment could also negatively impact the organization's judgment and investment decisions.

A more realistic context is that, for Stripe, the global fintech industry has undergone a valuation reset in the past two years, and a hasty IPO may not necessarily result in an ideal pricing. Rather than taking on cyclical risks, it is better to give time to the business itself.

Of course, delaying doesn't mean there are no risks. For example, tender offers and share buybacks can only provide temporary liquidity and cannot replace the continuous exit mechanism of the public market in the long run. Employees and early investors ultimately still need a transparent and stable liquidity channel. More importantly, future technological trends, regulatory environments, and competitive landscapes can change at any time. When Stripe decides to step into the limelight, the capital market may not necessarily give it the same premium.

Stablecoins and AI Agents: Stripe's New Ambitions

As traditional payment methods mature, Stripe is rapidly evolving into a financial operating system for the internet economy, attempting to seize the next financial track. Stablecoins and AI agents are becoming two new engines that Stripe is betting on.

Stripe's enthusiasm for crypto is not a passing fad. Back in 2015, it pioneered support for Bitcoin payments, but shut down the business due to immature infrastructure. It returned to the crypto payments arena in 2022 and began promoting stablecoins such as USDC two years later.

Over the past year, Stripe has made a series of moves in the crypto space, including the acquisition of the stablecoin platform Bridge for a huge sum, whose trading volume more than tripled last year; the acquisition of Privy, which supports 110 million programmable wallets; and the launch of the highly scalable blockchain Tempo in partnership with Paradigm, emphasizing sub-second settlement, enterprise-grade payment channels, privacy options, and interoperability with compliant systems.

In its 2025 annual letter, Stripe stated bluntly that while the crypto market winter was not over, stablecoins were experiencing a boom. Stablecoin payment transaction volume doubled to approximately $400 billion, with an estimated 60% being B2B payments.

With the rise of AI agents, Stripe is also targeting machine payments. Stripe believes that AI agents are gradually becoming independent economic entities, autonomously handling business activities such as payments, subscriptions, and capital allocation in the future. A large number of AI-driven transactions will emerge, but the existing financial infrastructure is not designed for machine-to-machine (M2M) payments. To support this new type of economic activity, the underlying clearing network must be restructured, and stablecoins and high-throughput blockchains will be key drivers.

“The core reason why Stripe is betting so heavily on USDC is related to this. Tempo is because the future world needs a highly scalable blockchain, while existing blockchains are not scalable enough due to technological trade-offs. Our philosophy is that not only humans need this capability, but AI agents need it even more, so Tempo is one of our core strategies in this field,” John Collison said in a recent interview.

To address the era of AI-driven agent commerce, Stripe is also aggressively pursuing AI business growth. Over the past year, Stripe has collaborated with OpenAI to develop the open standard Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), establishing a shared technical language between the AI ​​platform and merchants to support programmatic commerce workflows and instant checkout. It has also launched the Agentic Commerce Suite, Shared Payment Tokens, and a preview version of a machine payment system integrated with the x402 protocol.

Stripe views these not as fringe attempts, but as infrastructure with "generational impact potential," with universal interoperability and open design being the core logic behind its bet.

Thus, this unicorn company, valued at hundreds of billions of US dollars, is increasingly revealing its ambition to seize the next wave of internet economic growth.