Financial service company Stripe is reportedly on the verge of acquiring stablecoin platform Bridge in a deal worth up to $1.1bn.
Despite neither company not confirming the deal is close to completion, reports from Forbes indicated that Stripe wanted to deepen its coverage of the cryptocurrency field by acquiring Bridge, gaining access to its money moving expertise of stablecoins such as USDT and USDC.
If the deal were to be completed, it would represent the largest crypto deal in history by some distance. The most lucrative deal within the sector was the acquisition of Valkyrie Funds by CoinShares worth up to $530m.
The deal was first reported by Forbes and is believed to be in ‘advanced talks’ but according to TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington, the deal is finalised and is awaiting confirmation.
This potential acquisition would represent Stripe’s largest commitment to crypto after linking with several companies within the sector to enable its fiat-to-crypto transaction offering.
This year, the US-headquartered financial service partnered with crypto exchange Bitstamp to support its fiat-to-crypto transactions by leveraging one another’s platforms seeking to make crypto payments more seamless and mitigate any preconceived fears.
Before the partnership with Bitstamp, Stripe enabled crypto payments for its users in Europe along with a Pay with Crypto feature that allowed customers to pay with relevant stablecoins.
Co-Founded by former Coinbase employee Zach Abrams, Bridge is a stablecoin orchestration platform that facilitates the transferring and payments of stablecoins through its APIs.
Bridge also enables companies to issue and move their own native stablecoins, which could allow Stripe to create its own stablecoin but there is no indication from the company that they intend to do this.
It would not be surprising however if Stripe was to create a native stablecoin as it would follow the example of a growing number of financial service companies.
PayPal was the first major financial service to launch a native stablecoin last year with PYUSD, whilst Revolut, the UK’s largest fintech, is also mulling over the possibility of doing the same thing.
The merging of fintech and crypto has become even stronger over recent years and if Stripe were to complete its acquisition, this relationship would be strengthened as it see’s fintechs encompassing all facets of finance.
