Stripe Plans Stablecoin Card Rollout Across 100-Plus Countries by Year-End

Key points

Stripe plans to expand its stablecoin card programmes to more than 100 countries by end of 2026, with Henri Stern overseeing the stablecoin and crypto effort after Stripe acquired his firm, Privy, in 2025.
Monthly stablecoin card spending reached roughly $1.2 billion last month, triple the volume recorded a year earlier, according to Paymentscan.
Current stablecoin card customers include Kraken, Ramp, and Morse; the programmes predominantly use Circle's USDC, though Stripe states it intends to be stablecoin and blockchain agnostic.
Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge in 2024 and is also a founding investor in Open Standard, the issuer of the Open USD stablecoin, with Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams now running Open Standard full time.
Stripe is additionally exploring tokenised deposits and DeFi use cases, suggesting the stablecoin card expansion is one component of a wider blockchain payments infrastructure strategy rather than a standalone product move.

Stripe is planning to extend its stablecoin card programmes to more than 100 countries before the end of 2026, with Henri Stern, the co-founder of crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy that Stripe acquired last year, now leading stablecoin and crypto strategy across the company. Current card programme participants include crypto exchange Kraken, corporate spend platform Ramp, and payments app Morse. Monthly stablecoin card spending reached approximately $1.2 billion last month, according to data firm Paymentscan, a figure that has tripled over the past year, though it remains a small fraction of the global card market overall.

The expansion draws on infrastructure Stripe has been assembling since 2024. Its stablecoin card offering combines the company’s existing card-issuing business, which Stern says has produced more than 400 million cards and processed hundreds of billions of dollars in volume since 2018, with Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2024. The practical proposition for corporate clients such as Ramp is that stablecoin rails could replace the need to negotiate local banking and payments connections in each new market, while Kraken has explored enabling customers to spend directly from digital asset holdings.

Stripe’s broader infrastructure ambitions extend beyond card issuance. The company has partnered with crypto investment firm Paradigm to develop Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain, and is a founding investor in Open Standard, which is building Open USD, a stablecoin intended to compete with Circle‘s USDC and Tether‘s USDT. Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams has moved to run Open Standard full time. Stern described the component parts as designed to interoperate without forcing customers into a closed Stripe ecosystem, and stated the company intends to remain agnostic on both stablecoin choice and underlying blockchain. Stripe is also said to be exploring tokenised deposits and decentralised finance use cases, though those areas remain at an exploratory stage.

What this means

distribution & BD: The country-level reach of Bridge's rails, combined with Stripe's card-issuing scale, is the competitive surface area to map against existing correspondent banking and local acquiring relationships: for any market where a fintech client is rebuilding payment connections from scratch, the Stripe-Bridge bundle may arrive as a faster path before incumbents have a response.
product owner: Stripe's stated stablecoin and blockchain agnosticism, combined with its founding stake in Open USD and Tempo, raises the practical question of whether agnosticism holds under commercial pressure from its own network; product teams building on Stripe's stablecoin infrastructure should stress-test what switching costs look like if preferred stablecoin support changes over time.
collateral & funding desk: Monthly card spending at $1.2 billion and growing signals meaningful stablecoin float accumulation somewhere in the settlement chain; understanding where that float sits, who earns yield on it, and how Bridge's infrastructure handles redemption at scale is worth modelling before tokenised deposit products from the same stack arrive.
compliance/legal/risk: A 100-country rollout executed through stablecoin rails rather than conventional acquiring introduces a patchwork of e-money, virtual asset service provider, and payment institution licensing questions that will not resolve uniformly; the pace of expansion Stripe has signalled suggests those licensing decisions are already in progress, and counterparties relying on Stripe-powered programmes should verify regulatory coverage in their specific jurisdictions rather than assuming a global licence framework is in place.

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Coindesk Markets desk

coindesk.com

Stripe Plans Stablecoin Card Rollout Across 100-Plus Countries by Year-End

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