Original｜Odaily Planet Daily（@OdailyChina）

Author｜Wenser（@wenser 2010）

On February 24, 2026, the global payments industry welcomed two milestone “turning events”:

The first is Stripe announcing the completion of a new round of acquisition at a valuation of 159 billion dollars, with joint investments from Thrive Capital, Coatue, a16z, etc., soaring 74% from last year's valuation of 91.5 billion dollars. On that day, Stripe's two co-founders Patrick and John Collison released an open letter for 2025, reviewing Stripe's platform annual transaction volume of 1.9 trillion dollars—a year-on-year increase of 34%, accounting for approximately 1.6% of global GDP.

The second is the latest developments of the “old payment giant” PayPal: According to Bloomberg, PayPal is in contact with potential acquirers, with at least one large competitor evaluating this acquisition case. Upon the news, PayPal's stock price surged intraday by 9.7%, closing up about 5.76%, becoming the largest gain stock on the S&P 500 that day (Odaily Planet Daily Note: even as all three major indices fell that day).

Notably, according to subsequent reports from Bloomberg, Stripe is considering acquiring all or part of PayPal's business. Interesting, right? The former's good news lies in the skyrocketing valuation, while the latter's good news is “finally, a big player is willing to buy me.”

This is not just an interlude in the stories of two major payment giants, but feels more like a dividing line regarding “who sees the next era.”

Stripe's Infinite Game: The "Internet of Money" Operating System

If your understanding of Stripe is still stuck at "a company that does payment APIs," you are at least three years behind.

Looking back at Stripe's business revenue in 2025, its achievements are evident: 90% of companies in the Dow, and 80% of companies in the Nasdaq 100 index are using Stripe; almost all leading AI companies—OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), Cursor, Midjourney—rely on Stripe for their payment infrastructure; 25% of new registered companies in Delaware, known as the “heart of American innovation,” were founded through Stripe Atlas (Odaily Planet Daily Note: a B2B company registration service platform), with 20% of Atlas startup companies completing their first charge within 30 days of establishment in 2025, a significant jump from just 8% five years ago.

A significant driving force behind these achievements is undoubtedly Stripe's deep layout in the cryptocurrency payments and on-chain finance business line.

In their open letter, the Collison brothers wrote a statement that the entire payment industry, even the cryptocurrency market, must ponder: “We may have entered a crypto winter, but it is undoubtedly a summer for stablecoins.” Data corroborates this judgment—in 2025, the price of Bitcoin dropped about 50% from its peak, but stablecoin trading volume reached an unprecedented 34 trillion dollars; payment volume also doubled to approximately 400 billion dollars, with about 60% coming from B2B payment scenarios.

The reality is that in 2025, the growth in stablecoin adoption officially decoupled from the price volatility of crypto assets.

Before this turning point arrived, Stripe had already made significant bets:

In October 2024, it acquired stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for about 1.1 billion dollars, which was the largest single acquisition in the company's history, and after the acquisition, Bridge's transaction volume grew by over 4 times; in July 2025, it acquired crypto wallet infrastructure company Privy, which supports over 110 million programmable wallets;

In September 2025, it co-founded a payment-specific Layer 1 blockchain Tempo with Paradigm, which officially launched its mainnet in March 2026, supporting over 100,000 TPS, with sub-second settlement, already integrated by Visa, Shopify, Mastercard, Anthropic, OpenAI, Revolut, and others.

In this way, Stripe has built its own stablecoin ecosystem—stablecoin backend infrastructure Bridge, wallet frontend application Privy, and underlying settlement system Tempo—interconnected across the stablecoin issuance, custody, and settlement closed-loop ecosystem.

Looking further: Stripe also co-developed the Agent Commercial Protocol (ACP) with OpenAI, launching Machine Payments—allowing developers to charge API call fees directly to AI Agents, settling with microtransactions in stablecoins. 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 channels will seize the core lifeline of the AI economy first.

Stripe's Forward-Looking Vision: Copying Homework from the Entire Payment Industry

The advancement of Stripe's layout can be seen by looking at the actions of its peers.

In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would acquire stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK for up to 1.8 billion dollars, the largest acquisition Mastercard has ever made in the digital asset field. Mastercard's Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert candidly stated: “We expect that over time, most financial institutions and fintech companies will provide digital currency services.”

Note this phrase—“will provide.” Whereas Stripe is already providing it, and has been for a full year and a half. The timeline of this competition for stablecoin infrastructure is set here:

October 2024: Stripe acquires Bridge;

May 2025: Visa strategically invests in BVNK;

2025: Coinbase offers around 2 billion dollars to negotiate the acquisition of BVNK, but ultimately fails;

March 2026: Mastercard takes over BVNK for 1.8 billion dollars. While the entire traditional payments industry only began scrambling for this ticket in 2026, Stripe had already purchased it in 2024.

Additionally, there’s an interesting industry tidbit: Jack Zhang, founder of Airwallex previously revealed that as early as 2018, Stripe offered 1.2 billion dollars in an attempt to acquire Airwallex—at that time, Airwallex's annual revenue was only about 2 million dollars, corresponding to a valuation of about 600 times its revenue. This means that in cross-border payments, Stripe had already seen what others had not as early as 2018.

Foreknowledge has never been just a correct judgment but rather a sustained ability to perceive trends.

PayPal's Old Dilemma: When the Former Giant Loses Its Way in the New Navigational Era

Now let's turn to PayPal.

Summarizing the rise of this once-great company in one sentence: In 1998, PayPal was born in the golden age before the internet bubble burst, quickly becoming the payment standard for eBay e-commerce and an early foundation of internet finance. But the more glorious the history, the more brutally the current reality is highlighted: PayPal is losing speed across the board, and the position of loss happens to be where it once took pride.

In 2025, PayPal's net income was 33.2 billion dollars, with a growth rate of only 4.3%, down from 6.8% in 2024, continuing to decline. The core direct checkout business grew only 4% for the entire year, falling to 1% in Q4, a sharp drop from 7% a year ago—behind this number are Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, and Adyen's comprehensive encroachment on PayPal's core territory. In Q4, the number of transactions per active account decreased by 5%, with total active accounts stagnant around 439 million.

In February 2026, following the release of Q4 earnings, the stock price plummeted over 20% in a single day, with CEO Alex Chriss promptly resigning; new CEO Enrique Lores took over on March 1. Management's statement during the earnings call was: “Our execution has not met the necessary standards.”

The PYUSD card was previously PayPal's largest bet to enter the on-chain world, but reality gave it a hard slap: launched in August 2023, its current market value is still less than 4 billion dollars, with a market share of less than 0.5%, nearly negligible in the face of USDT and USDC, it is even outvalued by the latercomer USD1.

Until recently, after nearly three years, PayPal finally expanded PYUSD to approximately 70 markets globally—the move itself is not wrong, but in a competitive landscape where rivals have surged for nearly two years, the initial advantage is meaningless.

More critically, PayPal's “waking up early but arriving late” reflects a fundamental contradiction lurking beneath its surface business: PayPal’s business model relies on “transaction fees” to survive, while the stablecoin model depends on “holding assets to earn government bond interest.” There is a natural conflict between the two logics—every time PayPal promotes a PYUSD stablecoin payment, it somewhat eats into its traditional transaction fee revenue.

This is a problem that is challenging to resolve within PayPal's existing business framework.

New vs Old ‘Kings of Payments’: Who is Building New Infrastructure and Who is Repairing Old Pipelines?

Putting the two companies side by side, the divergence in fate does not lie in any single product decision, but in the radically different answers to the question “what is the next step for payments.”

PayPal's answer is to improve the existing payment services. Monetizing Venmo, BNPL business, and expanding PYUSD, these actions themselves are not problematic, but they all represent repairs within the existing framework rather than bets on the next paradigm.

When stablecoins emerged, PayPal's reaction was “Let’s issue a stablecoin too”; when the AI wave arrived, PayPal's reaction was “Let’s add a more convenient button on the checkout page.”

A leaf blocking the eye, obscuring the view of Mount Tai. PayPal’s misfortune is perhaps already predestined when the management and the entire company chose to maintain instead of engaging in disruptive innovation.

In contrast, Stripe has never been bound by the existing standard answers but has continuously sought better solutions.

In response to the proposition of “the future state of payments,” Stripe's answer is to redefine payment itself: starting from collecting with seven lines of code, building all the way to stablecoin orchestration (Bridge), crypto wallets (Privy), payment-specific blockchain (Tempo), and AI Agent commercial protocols (ACP)—each step is not about seizing market share in the existing payment market but rather about building the foundation for the next era of finance and payments.

The Collison brothers wrote in the 2025 Annual Summary Open Letter: “Our best guess is that the acceleration in 2025 marks the beginning of a greater turning point driven by large language models, entrepreneurship, and creativity.”

Behind this statement is a clear judgment: they have never operated merely a payment company; instead, they are laying the financial foundation for the next internet era.

In their view, the entire industry will ultimately head towards on-chain payments, stablecoin settlements, and AI Agent economies; this point is no longer controversial. The difference lies in: who is building this road, and who is waiting for the road to be built before coming on board.

Stripe chose the former and did so nearly two years ahead of its peers. PayPal’s current situation is that it is a large company with healthy cash flow, but has fallen behind on the trend of the times—it doesn't lack the cards to turn the tide, but the time window available to it is narrowing.

Of course, we must affirm that PayPal is not a “bad company;” it has 439 million active accounts, the social payment genes of Venmo, an annual transaction scale close to 2 trillion dollars, and a business model still generating real cash flow. However, in the new payment era, these assets feel more like a card that needs to be reactivated rather than a solid defensive moat.

Throughout history, every technological paradigm shift has seen a significant number of “taken-for-granted giants” swept into the dust of history. What PayPal faces now is precisely such a question that must be answered: do you want to continue being what appears to be a better yet stagnant PayPal or strive to be the next generation's payment infrastructure?

The answer determines fate.

Recommended Reading:

Stripe 2025 Annual Open Letter (Official Original)

Stripe Official Press Release: Offer Acquisition and Annual Update

Stripe is building the Tempo blockchain

Stripe is considering acquiring PayPal

Mastercard agrees to acquire BVNK for up to 1.8 billion dollars

PayPal Q4 2025 Earnings Report, CEO Departs

In-depth Analysis of PayPal's 2025 Performance

Airwallex founder reveals he rejected Stripe's 1.2 billion dollar acquisition offer

Mastercard plans to acquire BVNK for up to 1.8 billion dollars

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