Stripe says it is stablecoin agnostic. Its own one launched the day before

Stripe will take its stablecoin cards to more than 100 countries by the end of 2026. Spending on them runs at $1.2bn a month, three times the figure of a year ago, and Kraken, Ramp and Morse are already issuing. Henri Stern, who ran Privy before Stripe bought it and now heads crypto there, described the approach as «completely stablecoin agnostic, completely blockchain agnostic».

“If you're using Stripe, Bridge, Privy, Tempo, Open USD, it should be absolutely amazing”

— Анри Стерн, Глава направления стейблкоинов и криптовалют, Stripe

Every layer in that sentence belongs to Stripe

Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1bn in 2024 and got the stablecoin rails. It bought Privy in 2025 and got the wallets. Tempo, the payments chain it built with Paradigm, reached mainnet in March 2026. Open USD went live on 30 September with Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa holding equal founding stakes and more than $1bn committed to seed its liquidity.

The agnostic remark came on 1 October, one day after the stablecoin Stripe co-owns started operating. The claim is testable: watch which stablecoin the cards default to in the countries added next.

What $1.2bn a month is

Stripe stablecoin cards carry a $14.4bn annual run rate, up from roughly $400m a month last year. Set against the $313.3bn of stablecoins in circulation it is 4.6%. Set against the $5trn that Solana alone settled in stablecoin volume, the figure we counted on 24 September, it is 0.29%. The $1.1bn Stripe paid for Bridge equals 28 days of today's card spending.

Those ratios measure settlement volume. Card spending is retail spending, the one use stablecoins have barely had. Stripe has issued over 400 million cards since 2018 and processes card volume in the hundreds of billions. That reach is what it is putting behind the $1.2bn.

Two answers in one week

Citi and Coinbase went the other way on 29 September: merchants accept stablecoin payments and never hold a stablecoin, and the conversion sits behind the till. Stripe puts the stablecoin on a card so the holder can spend it at any terminal that takes the network. Both assume the shopper never opens a wallet.

Open USD stands at $667.6m five days after launch, which is 0.36% of USDT and still below the sum its founding partners pledged to seed it with. They committed more than $1bn between them, and the float sits at two thirds of that.

Informational material, not investment advice. The expansion is a stated plan for the end of 2026, and no country list has been published.