Stripe plans stablecoin cards in more than 100 countries by year-end

Stripe told CoinDesk it expects to be running stablecoin card programs in more than 100 countries by the end of the year, with crypto exchange Kraken, fintech Ramp and payments app Morse among the current customers. Henri Stern, chief executive and co-founder of Privy, the wallet infrastructure firm Stripe acquired last year, has added oversight of stablecoins and crypto across the payments company, and CoinDesk reports Stripe is also exploring tokenized deposits and DeFi use cases.

Beneath the expansion is a bet that digital dollars become another way for consumers and businesses to pay alongside traditional currencies, and the volume is no longer negligible: Paymentscan counts about $1.2 billion of stablecoins spent through cards last month, triple the amount a year earlier. It is still a fraction of global card payments, but it has moved past crypto trading and cross-border transfers into everyday purchases, inside a digital-dollar market CoinDesk puts above $300 billion and describes as hosting a fast-growing cards business.

Stripe's approach is to plug stablecoins into infrastructure it already runs: more than 400 million cards issued and hundreds of billions of dollars in card volume processed since 2018, Stern said, paired with Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe bought for $1.1 billion in 2024.

What the customers get is coverage: taking a corporate card into a new country normally means one more set of banking and payments connections, while for a company such as Ramp a stablecoin card could mean using the rails on both sides instead. Kraken, which CoinDesk describes as having explored letting customers spend from accounts where they already hold digital assets, points at the consumer version of the same idea.

The cards are one layer of a stack Stripe has assembled through purchase, partnership and incubation: it acquired Bridge and Privy, partnered with crypto investment firm Paradigm to develop the payments blockchain Tempo, and became a founding investor in Open Standard, the company building Open USD, a stablecoin that aims to challenge Circle's USDC and Tether's USDT. Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams has moved over to run Open Standard full time, and the pieces map neatly onto the functions a card program needs—stablecoin infrastructure, wallet infrastructure, a settlement chain and a token Stripe helped pay for.

Stern describes the pieces as built to work closely together without locking customers into Stripe's ecosystem, telling CoinDesk that a business using Stripe, Bridge, Privy, Tempo and Open USD should feel as though the systems were designed to exist together—a sales pitch as much as an architecture claim. The go-to-market follows the same logic: each piece is sold on its own and designed to be bought together. Many card programs currently use Circle's USDC, and Stern said Stripe intends to remain "completely stablecoin agnostic, completely blockchain agnostic."

The agnosticism is convenient for customers and cheaper for Stripe than backing a winner, and it lets the company hold a stake in Open USD without requiring anyone to use it; Stripe is selling the acceptance layer rather than a token. As this publication has argued, the stablecoin payout layer is a licensing business, and what a card program needs in its hundredth country is not different in kind from what it needed in its first: local scheme connections, audits, and a partner that already holds the issuing relationships. Eight years of ordinary card issuing built exactly that, which is why the stablecoin expansion looks like a distribution decision more than a research project, and why the house position that stablecoin competition has moved from issuance toward recognition and distribution gets a concrete case here—from a company that is also a founding investor in a challenger token.

Tokenized deposits would push that logic into bank money, and they arrive on ground still being divided. Clarity's defeat handed banks the deposit fight in September, with the Senate bill dead at 49-50 and the SEC and CFTC left to write the interim rules. CoinDesk's account does not say what Stripe would do with tokenized deposits or how developed its DeFi exploration is, so the clearest reading of both is optionality: a company that can offer a client a bank deposit token or a private stablecoin on rails it already operates in more than 100 countries would sit on both sides of that argument without having to choose one.

The first real check on the card number arrives when the year ends: the coverage does not say how many countries the stablecoin programs operate in today, what share of the more than 400 million issued cards carry the capability, or whether the 100-country target counts live programs or signed ones. Watch whether Ramp's cross-border corporate card and Kraken's spend-from-account feature move from explored to shipped, and whether Open USD turns up on a Stripe card program of its own.