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The handover of the payment industry: The hundred billion unicorn Stripe may swallow PayPal, heavily investing in stablecoins and AI

2026-02-27 09:55:49

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Author: Nancy, PANews

The pioneer of payments, PayPal, may be facing a takeover, with the rumored buyer being the yet-to-be-listed payment newcomer, Stripe.

Two representative companies from different internet eras, employing two distinctly different payment strategies, have now diverged in their fates: one has welcomed a high valuation halo of $159 billion, while the other has entered a long revaluation cycle after its glory days faded.

To date, this upstart has yet to ring the Nasdaq bell, opting to retain its strategic freedom as a private company, and is accelerating its bets on stablecoins and AI, pouring substantial funds into entirely new financial tracks.

A Turning Point in the Payment Landscape: Rumored Acquisition of Pioneer PayPal

In the global payment landscape, the winds are quietly shifting.

According to Bloomberg, citing informed sources, Stripe has expressed preliminary interest in potentially acquiring PayPal or its assets and is considering acquiring all or part of the company.

Just recently, Stripe President John Collison candidly stated in an interview, "PayPal has had a tough few years, and the market landscape has changed significantly, with the rise of competitors like Apple Pay and Google Pay. I can't comment on any acquisition hypotheses, but they have indeed gone through a difficult period." This remark has fueled the acquisition rumors.

The story of PayPal is a microcosm of the first generation of internet finance.

Starting from the eBay era, it became the absolute infrastructure for global cross-border payments, creating a payment empire that peaked at a market value of $360 billion. The PayPal Mafia (including notable figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, etc.) has profoundly influenced the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Silicon Valley.

However, times have changed. With stagnant growth in active users, executive turmoil, and strong pressure from competitors, the stock price of this giant has sharply retreated, and its market share continues to shrink, leading to a drastic reduction in the capital market's imagination of its future potential.

In contrast to the faltering steps of its predecessor, Stripe, founded in 2010, has hit the golden window of the mobile internet explosion and the SaaS startup wave. With its "a few lines of code to integrate payments" minimalist experience, Stripe quickly opened up the market, evolving from a payment API tool to a full-stack infrastructure giant covering global payments, revenue growth, fund management, and compliance.

Today, this invisible money-printing machine is one of the most valuable and fastest-growing private tech companies globally.

According to Stripe's 2025 annual public letter, its services now cover over 5 million businesses, processing a total payment volume of $1.9 trillion last year, equivalent to about 1.6% of global GDP. Meanwhile, this "new wave" recently initiated an internal share buyback at an astonishing valuation of $159 billion, while its former big brother PayPal currently has a market value of only about $54 billion.

As the new wave pushes the old wave, if this acquisition comes to fruition, it could become one of the most iconic cases in Silicon Valley history.

PayPal holds over 400 million active accounts, along with assets like the popular money transfer app Venmo and Braintree, favored by young Americans. Once integrated into its portfolio, Stripe would complete the consumer-side puzzle and enhance its competitiveness in the payment processing market. Moreover, PayPal's US dollar stablecoin PYUSD would align closely with Stripe's ongoing crypto strategy.

For Stripe, this acquisition could represent not just scale expansion but also a crucial strategic complement, bridging the gap from infrastructure to traffic entry.

Stripe, with No Lack of Funds, Delays the IPO Bell

Despite its soaring valuation and robust financial health, Stripe has no immediate plans for an IPO.

Although Stripe has long met the conditions for going public and has engaged major investment banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan to advise on future listing plans, it has yet to press the button for an IPO, which seems out of step with the recent trend of capital markets pushing for rapid listings.

The most direct confidence comes from Stripe's solid financial status.

Unlike many companies that turn to the public market due to funding needs, Stripe has already achieved profitability and maintains a stable positive cash flow, allowing it to fund daily operations, expansion, and acquisitions through its own cash-generating capabilities and private financing.

As for the liquidity demands of early investors and employees, it provides periodic tender offers and secondary market share transfers, creating phased exit channels while remaining private. This somewhat diminishes the urgency for an IPO.

More critically, the strategic space afforded by its private status.

In the view of Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, public companies typically need to prioritize "harvesting," while remaining private allows them to invest more resources and time into infrastructure development and long-term investments, focusing on customers and products rather than quarterly earnings and expectation management.

Over the past six years, Stripe has consistently allocated a higher proportion of its revenue to R&D than most of its peers. In 2025 alone, Stripe released over 350 product updates. Additionally, Stripe has built a moat through acquisitions and ecosystem expansion, such as the acquisition of Metronome, which is expected to achieve an annual revenue of $1 billion this year.

This logic is particularly important at the current stage of development. Stripe is still in an expansion cycle and needs to continue ramping up investments in R&D, product innovation, strategic acquisitions, and global positioning. Especially in high-investment, long-cycle, and high-uncertainty areas like AI and stablecoins, these may not necessarily translate into profits in the short term.

If it were to go public now, its strategic rhythm would inevitably be influenced by earnings cycles, and the periodic fluctuations in profits could be exaggerated in interpretation, while market sentiment could also inversely affect organizational judgment and investment decisions.

The more realistic backdrop is that, for Stripe, the global fintech industry has undergone a valuation reset over the past two years, and hastily going public may not yield ideal pricing. Rather than taking on cyclical risks, it is better to give time to the business itself.

Of course, delaying does not mean there are no risks. For instance, tender offers and share buybacks can only provide temporary liquidity and cannot long-term replace the continuous exit mechanisms of the public market. Employees and early investors ultimately still need a transparent and stable liquidity channel. More importantly, future technological trends, regulatory environments, and competitive landscapes may change at any time, and when Stripe decides to step into the limelight, the capital market may not necessarily offer the same premium.

Stablecoins and AI Agents: Stripe's New Ambitions

As traditional payments have matured, Stripe is accelerating its evolution into the financial operating system of the internet economy, attempting to seize the next financial track. Stablecoins and AI Agents are becoming the two new engines Stripe is betting on.

Stripe's enthusiasm for crypto is not a fleeting whim. As early as 2015, it was among the first to support Bitcoin payments but had to shut down the related business due to immature infrastructure; it re-entered the crypto payment space in 2022 and began promoting stablecoin businesses like USDC two years later.

In the past year, Stripe has made continuous moves in the crypto space, including the massive acquisition of the stablecoin platform Bridge, whose transaction volume grew more than threefold last year; acquiring Privy, which supports 110 million programmable wallets, and launching the highly scalable blockchain Tempo in collaboration with Paradigm, emphasizing sub-second settlement, enterprise-level payment channels, privacy options, and interoperability with compliance systems.

In its 2025 annual public letter, Stripe stated that although the crypto market has not yet emerged from winter, stablecoins have entered summer. The transaction volume of stablecoin payments has doubled to about $400 billion, with an estimated 60% being B2B payments.

With the rise of AI agents, Stripe is also targeting payments for machines. Stripe believes that AI Agents are gradually becoming independent economic entities that will autonomously handle payments, subscriptions, capital allocation, and other business activities. A large number of AI-driven transactions are expected to emerge, but 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 along with high-throughput blockchains will become key drivers.

"The core reason Stripe is betting so heavily on USDC is related to this, as the future world needs a highly scalable blockchain, and existing blockchains are not strong enough in scalability due to technical trade-offs. Our philosophy is that not only do humans need this capability, but AI Agents need it even more, so Tempo is one of our most critical layouts in this area," John Collison stated in a recent interview.

To prepare for the era of AI agent commerce, Stripe is also vigorously promoting 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 AI platforms and merchants to support programmatic commerce flows and instant checkout; simultaneously launching the Agentic Commerce Suite, Shared Payment Tokens, and a preview of a machine payment system integrated with the x402 protocol.

In Stripe's view, these are not marginal attempts but infrastructures with "generational impact potential," where universal interoperability and open design are the core logic of its bets.

Thus, this billion-dollar unicorn's ambition to seize the next wave of internet economic growth is gradually becoming apparent.

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