When the company that processes nearly $2 trillion in payments every year says it wants to become the “AWS for money” and puts stablecoins at the centre of that plan, the crypto industry should pay attention. That is exactly what Stripe announced at the RWA Summit in Cannes this week.
Stripe is integrating stablecoins and blockchain across its core payments stack in a bid to become an “AWS for money” and speed up global money movement, said Adrien Duchateau, the firm’s head of crypto GTM. The company is using acquisitions like Bridge and Privy and a new blockchain called Tempo to cut settlement times from days to near-instant.
The comparison to Amazon Web Services is deliberate. AWS did not invent the internet. It made it possible for any business to use the internet’s infrastructure without building servers. Stripe is making the same bet with stablecoins: that most businesses want the benefits of blockchain settlement without the complexity of managing wallets, custody, or compliance themselves.
What Stripe Has Built
Stripe’s crypto strategy is not a side project. Over the past 18 months, the company has assembled a full stack of stablecoin infrastructure through a series of acquisitions and product launches that, taken together, represent the most aggressive push into crypto by any major payments company in the world.
The company acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2024, then bought crypto wallet provider Privy. It also teamed up with crypto investment firm Paradigm to develop a payments-focused blockchain called Tempo, which went live last month with infrastructure partners like Mastercard, UBS, Klarna, and Visa.
Bridge gives Stripe the back-end plumbing for issuing, converting, and settling stablecoins. Privy gives it embedded wallet infrastructure so end users never have to deal with seed phrases or gas fees. And Tempo gives it a blockchain purpose-built for payments rather than trading, with sub-second finality and dedicated payment lanes designed to handle the kind of throughput that a company processing $2 trillion a year actually needs.
The company is already rolling out stablecoin features. Merchants can accept stablecoins at checkout, including through Shopify, while platforms like Remote.com allow users to receive payouts in crypto. Through Bridge, it also helps fintechs like Klarna and Slash issue and integrate stablecoins in their operations.
Where the Demand Is Coming From
The most interesting part of Stripe’s strategy is not the technology. It is where the customers are.
Stripe aims to make it seamless for users to move between traditional banking rails and crypto, with particular focus on emerging markets where stablecoins and DeFi can offer services that conventional banks struggle to provide. Duchateau pointed to emerging countries like Argentina as an example, where stablecoins and decentralised finance could enable services that are difficult to deliver through traditional banking.
In the Global South, credit cards often do not work. Banking infrastructure is unreliable. Local currencies are unstable. Cross-border payments are expensive and slow. These are not edge cases. They represent billions of people and trillions of dollars in economic activity that the traditional payments system has failed to serve well.
Stablecoins solve these problems directly. A business in Lagos can receive USDC from a customer in London in seconds, at a fraction of the cost of a SWIFT transfer, without either party needing a correspondent banking relationship. That is not a theoretical use case. It is happening now, and Stripe wants to be the infrastructure layer that makes it as easy as adding a few lines of code.
Why This Is an Ethereum Story
Stablecoins run primarily on Ethereum and its Layer 2 networks. USDC, the stablecoin at the centre of Stripe’s strategy, settles the majority of its volume on Ethereum. When Stripe processes a stablecoin payment through Bridge or enables a merchant to accept USDC through Shopify, that transaction ultimately settles on Ethereum’s base layer or one of its Layer 2s.
Stripe’s Tempo blockchain is a separate chain, but it is designed to be interoperable with existing networks including Ethereum. As Stripe scales its stablecoin payments volume, the demand for block space on Ethereum and its ecosystem increases. More stablecoin transactions mean more settlement activity, more fee revenue, and more utility for ETH as the gas token that powers the network.
What Open Issuance Means
Perhaps the most ambitious piece of Stripe’s strategy is Open Issuance, a platform that lets any business launch its own stablecoin with a few lines of code. Reserves are managed by BlackRock, Fidelity, and Superstate. Cash is held by Lead Bank. All coins issued through Open Issuance are fully interoperable with each other.
This means a neobank in Brazil could launch a dollar-denominated stablecoin for its customers, backed by institutional-grade reserves, without building any of the infrastructure itself. Stripe handles the minting, burning, compliance, and reserve management. The neobank gets a stablecoin product that competes with USDC and USDT but with its own branding and customer relationship.
What It Means for Crypto
Stripe is not a crypto company. It is a payments company that has decided crypto infrastructure is the best way to solve its hardest problems: cross-border settlement speed, emerging market access, and the cost of moving money globally. That distinction matters because it means Stripe’s crypto adoption is driven by commercial logic, not ideology. When a $91.5 billion payments company decides stablecoins are the future of settlement, it is not making a philosophical argument. It is making a business decision based on processing $2 trillion a year and knowing where the friction is.
For Ethereum, for stablecoins, and for the broader crypto ecosystem, Stripe’s “AWS for money” bet is one of the most significant endorsements of blockchain infrastructure by a mainstream technology company to date. The question is no longer whether stablecoins will become part of global payments. It is who will control the infrastructure layer. Stripe just made its answer very clear.
