Aishwary Gupta, global head of business development at Polygon Labs, said he thinks the majority of money will live and move on Blockchain in some form in the next few years, and said such a step would accelerate this transition. According to an international news agency, Stripe and Advent made an offer to buy PayPal for $53 billion. Both companies have expanded their stablecoin initiatives in recent years.
Stripe is participating in the formation of more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock, to launch the Open USD stablecoin. Open USD, which is expected to launch this year, is built on a pass-through model that directs almost all of its reserve return to distributors, leaving it with a small management fee. According to analysts, this model could create competitive pressure for Circle's USDC and PayPal's PYUSD. PayPal became the first major financial technology company to launch its own dollar-backed stablecoin in 2023, and this month announced that PYUSD could be issued on Polygon.
According to Gupta, Stripe brings merchant depth and crypto momentum, while PayPal brings hundreds of millions of users and stablecoin activity. The executive said that when the two come together, a machine that can handle a significant global volume will emerge.
William Blair analysts, on the other hand, offered a more cautious view on the impact of the agreement and stated that they did not fully see the logic of such an agreement. A combined structure could have more stablecoin weighting, but PayPal's stablecoin is only 4 percent of USDC's market cap, analysts say. William Blair emphasized that they found Stripe's stablecoin infrastructure Bridge interesting, but Stripe did not have to purchase PayPal to advance its stablecoin goals.
According to industry data, the supply of USDC, the world's second largest stablecoin, is over $70 billion, and the market value of PYUSD is $2.8 billion. This picture feeds the cautious view that the contribution of the merger on the stablecoin side may remain limited.
Stripe has previously shown interest in acquiring PayPal. At the time, Mizuho analysts noted that Stripe, largely seen as a business-to-business payments provider, would gain a scaled retail business by acquiring PayPal, which also owns peer-to-peer payment network Venmo. PayPal shares closed at $55.52, up nearly 17 percent on the day on news of the offer. Some analysts have pointed out that the stock is relatively undervalued at around a 10x earnings multiple and lags other technology stocks.