Written by: Wenser , Planet Daily

On February 24, 2026, the global payments industry witnessed two significant "turning point events":

First, Stripe announced the completion of a new round of tender offers with a valuation of $159 billion , jointly invested by institutions such as Thrive Capital, Coatue, and a16z, representing a 74% surge in valuation from $91.5 billion a year ago. On the same day, Stripe's two co-founders, Patrick and John Collison, released their 2025 annual letter, reviewing the $1.9 trillion in annual transaction volume on the Stripe platform—a 34% year-on-year increase, representing approximately 1.6% of global GDP.

Secondly, there's the latest news about PayPal, the former payment giant: According to Bloomberg, PayPal is in talks with potential acquirers, and at least one major competitor is evaluating the acquisition. Following the news, PayPal's stock price surged as much as 9.7% intraday, closing up approximately 5.76% , becoming the biggest gainer in the S&P 500 that day (Odaily note: even though all three major indices fell that day).

What's worth noting is that, according to a subsequent Bloomberg report, Stripe was considering acquiring all or part of PayPal's business. Interesting, isn't it? The former's advantage lies in its soaring valuation; while the latter's advantage is that "finally, a big investor is willing to buy me."

This is not just an interlude in the story of the two payment giants, but more like a dividing line about "who sees the next era".

Stripe's Infinite Game: The "Funds Internet" Operating System

If your understanding of Stripe is still limited to "a company that makes payment APIs," then you're at least three years behind.

Looking back at Stripe's revenue in 2025, its achievements are undeniable: 90% of the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80% of the companies in the Nasdaq 100 use Stripe; almost all leading AI companies—OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), Cursor, and Midjourney—use Stripe for their payment infrastructure; in Delaware, known as the "heartland of American innovation," 25% of newly registered companies are established through Stripe Atlas (Note: a B2B company registration service platform) , and in 2025, 20% of Atlas startups completed their first payment within 30 days of establishment, a figure that was only 8% five years ago.

The key driver behind these achievements is undoubtedly Stripe's deep strategic layout in the business lines of crypto payments and on-chain finance.

In their lengthy open letter, the Collison brothers wrote a statement that has prompted deep reflection across the entire payments industry and even the crypto market: "We may be in a crypto winter now, but it is definitely a stablecoin summer." Data confirms this assessment— in 2025, while Bitcoin's price fell by about 50% from its peak, stablecoin trading volume reached an unprecedented $34 trillion; payment volume doubled to approximately $400 billion, with about 60% coming from B2B payment scenarios.

The reality is that by 2025, the data growth adopted by stablecoins will be officially decoupled from the price volatility of crypto assets.

Stripe had already placed a heavy bet before this turning point arrived:

In October 2024, it acquired stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for approximately $1.1 billion , the company's largest single acquisition to date. After the acquisition, Bridge's trading volume increased more than fourfold . In July 2025, it acquired crypto wallet infrastructure company Privy , which supports more than 110 million programmable wallets .

In September 2025, it partnered with Paradigm to incubate Tempo, a Layer 1 blockchain designed specifically for payments. The mainnet officially launched in March 2026, supporting over 100,000 TPS and sub-second settlements. Visa, Shopify, Mastercard, Anthropic, OpenAI, Revolut, and others have already integrated with it.

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

Looking further ahead: Stripe has also collaborated with OpenAI to develop the Intelligent Agent Business Protocol (ACP) , launching Machine Payments —allowing developers to directly charge AI Agents API call fees for stablecoin micropayments. This is a payment scenario that has never existed before. Stripe's judgment is straightforward: when AI Agents begin to make purchasing decisions on behalf of humans, whoever controls the payment channels will seize the core lifeline of the AI economy.

Stripe's forward-thinking approach: Learning from the entire payments industry

Just look at the moves of its competitors to see how advanced Stripe's strategy is.

In March 2026, Mastercard announced its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK for up to $1.8 billion , marking Mastercard's largest acquisition in the digital asset space to date. Mastercard's Chief Product Officer, Jorn Lambert, stated frankly, "We anticipate that over time, most financial institutions and fintech companies will offer digital currency services."

Note this phrase—"will provide." Stripe has already been providing it, and for a full year and a half. The timeline of this battle for stablecoin infrastructure is laid out here:

In October 2024, Stripe acquired Bridge;

In May 2025, Visa made a strategic investment in BVNK;

In 2025, Coinbase offered approximately $2 billion to acquire BVNK, but the deal ultimately fell through.

In March 2026, Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion. While the entire traditional payments industry is only starting to scramble for this deal in 2026, Stripe had already bought it in 2024.

Another interesting industry tidbit: Airwallex founder Jack Zhang previously revealed that as early as 2018, Stripe attempted to acquire Airwallex with a $1.2 billion offer —at that time, Airwallex's annual revenue was only about $2 million, corresponding to a valuation of approximately 600 times its revenue. This means that in the cross-border payment field, Stripe had already seen something that others hadn't yet noticed as early as 2018.

Foresight is never a single correct judgment, but a continuous ability to perceive trends.

PayPal's Old Dilemma: When a Former Giant Lost Its Way in the New Age of Exploration

Let's look at PayPal next.

To summarize the rise of this former giant in one sentence: Founded in 1998 during the golden age before the dot-com bubble burst, PayPal quickly became the standard payment solution for eBay and an early pioneer in internet finance. But the more glorious its history, the more brutal the current reality becomes: PayPal is losing momentum across the board, and right where it lost momentum is precisely where it was once most proud.

In 2025, PayPal's net revenue was $33.2 billion , a growth rate of only 4.3% , lower than the 6.8% in 2024, continuing its downward trend. Its core direct checkout business grew by only 4% throughout the year, falling to 1% in Q4, a precipitous drop from 7% a year earlier—behind this figure lies the comprehensive encroachment of Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, and Adyen on PayPal's core market share. The number of transactions per active account in Q4 decreased by 5% year-on-year, and the total number of active accounts remained stagnant at around 439 million .

In February 2026, after the release of its Q4 financial report, the company's stock price plummeted by more than 20% in a single day. CEO Alex Chriss subsequently resigned, and Enrique Lores took over as new CEO on March 1. Management's statement during the conference call was: "Our execution has not reached the required level."

PYUSD was once PayPal's biggest gamble in its attempt to enter the on-chain world, but reality has given it a harsh slap in the face: launched in August 2023, its current market value is less than $4 billion, and its market share is less than 0.5% , which is almost negligible compared to USDT and USDC, and even the market value of USD1, a latecomer, cannot compare.

Until recently, after nearly three years, PayPal expanded PYUSD to about 70 markets worldwide. This move itself was not wrong, but in a market where competitors had been making rapid progress for nearly two years, the advantage of getting ahead was meaningless.

More fatally, PayPal's "early start, late finish" reflects a fundamental contradiction hidden beneath its surface business: PayPal's business model relies on "transaction fees," while stablecoins depend on "earning interest from stagnant assets." There is an inherent conflict between these two logics—every time PayPal promotes a PYUSD stablecoin payment, it is, to some extent, eroding its traditional transaction fee revenue.

This problem is difficult to solve within PayPal's existing business framework.

The battle between the old and new "payment kings": Who is building new infrastructure and who is repairing old pipelines?

Looking at the two companies side by side, the turning point in their destinies did not lie in a particular product decision, but in their drastically different answers to the question of "what is the next step in payments".

PayPal's answer is to improve its existing payment services. The monetization of Venmo, the BNPL business, and the expansion of PYUSD are not inherently problematic, but they are all repairs within the existing framework, rather than bets on the next paradigm.

When stablecoins emerged, PayPal's response was, "Let's issue a stablecoin too"; but when the AI wave arrived, PayPal's response was, "Let's add a more convenient and faster function button to the checkout page."

A leaf before the eyes obscures Mount Tai. PayPal's downfall may have been inevitable when management and the entire company chose to maintain the status quo rather than pursue disruptive innovation.

In contrast, Stripe is never confined to existing standard answers; instead, it is always pursuing better solutions.

Faced with the question of "the future state of payments," Stripe's answer is to redefine payments themselves: starting with seven lines of code for receiving payments, it has built stablecoin orchestration (Bridge), crypto wallets (Privy), payment-specific blockchain (Tempo), and AI intelligent agent business protocol (ACP) – each step is not about grabbing market share in the existing payments market, but about building the foundation for the next era of finance and payments.

In their 2025 year-end summary letter, the Collison brothers wrote: " Our best guess is that the acceleration in 2025 marks the beginning of a larger inflection point in entrepreneurship and creativity driven by the big language model."

Behind this statement lies a clear-headed judgment—they are not just operating a payment company, but laying the financial foundation for the next internet era.

In their view, the entire industry will eventually move towards on-chain payments, stablecoin settlements, and AI agent economics—a point that is largely undisputed. The only difference lies in who is building the road and who is waiting for it to be completed before joining in.

Stripe chose the former, and almost two years earlier than its competitors. PayPal is now in a situation where it is a large company with healthy cash flow, but it is a step behind in terms of the times—it is not without its trump cards to turn things around, but the window of opportunity for it is narrowing.

Of course, we must acknowledge that PayPal is not a "bad company." It boasts 439 million active accounts, Venmo's social payment DNA, nearly $2 trillion in annual transaction volume, and a business model that continues to generate real cash flow. However, in the new era of payments, these assets are more like a trump card that needs to be reactivated than an impregnable moat.

Throughout history, every shift in technological paradigms has swept away a large number of "taken-for-granted giants" into the dustbin of history. PayPal now faces precisely such a crucial question: Will it continue to be a seemingly better but ultimately stagnant PayPal, or will it strive to become the next generation's payment infrastructure?

The answer determines destiny.

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