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Stripe has rolled out a new financial infrastructure product allowing global businesses to hold and transact in U.S. dollar stablecoins, the payments company’s latest expansion into blockchain-backed services.
The feature is dubbed Stablecoin Financial Accounts and enables users in 101 countries to store balances in dollar-pegged tokens, receive payments in both cryptocurrencies and traditional currencies, and send stablecoins across borders. At launch, the platform supports Circle’s USDC and Bridge’s USDB, with plans to add more stablecoins over time.
The announcement follows Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of stablecoin platform Bridge in February. Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge, a Sequoia-backed company that focuses on moving money using stablecoins, remains the largest crypto-related merger to date. Bridge provides APIs that allow businesses to accept and move stablecoin payments globally with reduced complexity.
The company says the new product will help entrepreneurs in countries with unstable currencies protect their purchasing power and tap into global markets more easily. Industry observers believe the product could unlock a substantial revenue stream for Stripe through earnings on reserves held in assets like U.S. Treasurys.
“Many of the world’s largest companies are turning to Stripe to help assemble their stablecoin strategies,” the company said in a statement.
The stablecoin feature arrives alongside another major release, an artificial intelligence-based foundation model for payment processing. Stripe says the model was trained on tens of billions of transactions to identify patterns in payment behavior that can help detect fraud and improve transaction approval rates.
According to Stripe, the system captures hundreds of subtle markers during a payment, providing broader insight than what traditional rule-based systems typically catch. It is reportedly the first such model built specifically for payments infrastructure.
Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison described the convergence of stablecoins and AI as “gale-force tailwinds” pushing the global economy into a new phase. “There are not one, but two, gale-force tailwinds, well off the Beaufort scale, dramatically reshaping the economic landscape around us: AI and stablecoins,” he said in the announcement.
Stripe initially became a leader in the crypto space when it introduced Bitcoin payment support in 2014. However, it discontinued the feature in 2018, citing declining demand, long transaction times, higher fees, and price volatility. The company reintroduced crypto payments last week, supporting USDC stablecoin transactions on Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon networks.
