Stripe Takes Stablecoin Cards Global, Aiming for Over 100 Countries by Year-End

Stripe plans to roll out its stablecoin card programs in more than 100 countries before the year ends, as it bets that digital dollars can sit beside traditional currencies as a normal way to pay. Henri Stern, the Privy co-founder whom Stripe acquired last year, has taken on an extra role running stablecoins and crypto across the company. Kraken, Ramp and the payments app Morse are among the current customers.

Stablecoin Card Spending Growth

The push arrives as card spending with stablecoins grows fast inside a digital dollar market worth more than $300 billion. Paymentscan data shows roughly $1.2 billion was spent through stablecoin cards last month, three times the figure from a year earlier. That is still small next to the global card market, but it shows stablecoins moving beyond trading and cross-border transfers into daily purchases.

Stripe, Bridge and Privy Infrastructure

Stripe is building on what it already owns. It has issued over 400 million cards and handled hundreds of billions of dollars in volume since 2018, and it pairs that business with Bridge, the stablecoin firm it bought for $1.1 billion in 2024. A company like Ramp could use this to take a corporate card into new countries without rebuilding banking links market by market, while Kraken has looked at letting customers spend straight from the digital assets they hold.

Tempo, Open USD and a Stablecoin-Agnostic Strategy

Beyond Bridge and Privy, Stripe worked with Paradigm on Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain, and is a founding investor in Open Standard, which is developing the Open USD stablecoin to compete with USDC and USDT. Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams now runs Open Standard full time.