Stripe Takes Stablecoin Cards to 100-Plus Countries: $1.2 Billion Spent in September, and the Coin, the Chain and the Wallet Are All In-House
CoinDesk reported on October 1 that Stripe plans to expand its stablecoin card programs to more than 100 countries by year-end. Spending on those cards hit $1.2 billion in September, triple the figure a year earlier.
Three key facts
The people move came first: Henri Stern, CEO of the wallet infrastructure firm Privy that Stripe acquired in 2025, now oversees stablecoins and crypto across all of Stripe. Current stablecoin card customers include Kraken, Ramp and Morse, whose users spend stablecoin balances at ordinary merchants.
Stripe's crypto puzzle is now complete: it bought stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2024, built the payments chain Tempo with Paradigm, and is a founding investor in the stablecoin Open USD, aimed squarely at USDC and USDT. Stern put it plainly: if you are using Stripe, Bridge, Privy, Tempo and Open USD, it should feel like these systems were built to exist together.
Next up are tokenized deposits, DeFi use cases and accepting more digital assets as payment. Three weeks ago SoFi announced it had settled $25 billion of card volume in stablecoins. Stablecoins are turning from a trading chip into card plumbing.
WangDou's Take
The coin, the chain, the wallet and the card, all four in-house. Decentralized here means the center moved from Circle to Stripe. Stern's line about systems built to exist together sounds familiar to any old founder: that is vertical integration. Apple calls it an ecosystem. Regulators call it bundling. The card works in 100 countries, but the money travels on Stripe's own chain in Stripe's own coin. What the merchant saves on Visa fees it pays back as Stripe's toll. A month of $1.2 billion and triple growth sounds fierce, but the base was $400 million a year ago, nowhere near the volume that keeps card networks awake at night. The direction is painted on the wall, though: the payments company no longer wants to be the pipe. It wants to be the mint.
Source: CoinDesk · Stripe to expand stablecoin cards to over 100 countries