The new generation of the payment industry: trillion-dollar unicorn Stripe may acquire PayPal, heavily investing in stablecoins and AI

Written by: Nancy, PANews

PayPal, the pioneer in payments, may be acquired, with the rumored buyer being the yet-to-go-public payment startup Stripe.

Two iconic companies from the internet era, with completely different payment strategies, are now heading toward different fates: one has achieved a $159 billion high valuation halo, while the other, after its peak, is entering a long revaluation cycle.

To date, this emerging star has not yet rung the Nasdaq bell, choosing to retain strategic freedom by staying private, and is accelerating investments in stablecoins and AI, channeling significant funds into new financial tracks.

Reversal in the payment industry: Rumored acquisition of PayPal

In the global payments industry, the trend is quietly shifting.

According to Bloomberg, citing insiders, Stripe has expressed preliminary interest in potentially acquiring PayPal or its assets, considering buying all or part of the company.

Recently, Stripe President John Collison stated in an interview, “PayPal has had a pretty tough few years, with significant market shifts, such as the rise of Apple Pay and Google Pay. I can’t comment on any merger or acquisition hypotheses, but they have indeed gone through a difficult period.” This comment has further fueled acquisition rumors.

PayPal’s story is a microcosm of first-generation internet finance.

Starting from eBay, becoming the infrastructure for global cross-border payments, PayPal once built a payment empire, reaching a peak market cap of $360 billion. The so-called PayPal “mafia” (including notable figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman) profoundly influenced Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. However, as time passed, with stagnating active users, executive turmoil, and fierce competition, the company’s stock price plummeted, market share shrank, and investor imagination about its future rapidly diminished.

Compared to its predecessor’s sluggish progress, Stripe, founded in 2010, hit the golden window of mobile internet explosion and SaaS startup boom. With its “plug-and-play” payment API, Stripe quickly gained traction, evolving from a simple payment API tool into a global payment, revenue growth, fund management, and compliance infrastructure giant.

Today, this invisible money-printing machine is one of the most highly valued and fastest-growing private tech companies worldwide.

According to Stripe’s 2025 annual report, its services now cover over 5 million businesses, processing a total of $1.9 trillion in payments last year—about 1.6% of global GDP. Recently, this “latecomer” launched an internal share buyback at an astonishing $159 billion valuation, while its former giant, PayPal, has a current market cap of only around $54 billion.

The wave behind the wave: If this acquisition materializes, it could become one of the most iconic cases in Silicon Valley history.

PayPal holds over 400 million active accounts and owns assets like Venmo and Braintree, which are highly popular among young Americans. If integrated, Stripe would complete the consumer-side puzzle and strengthen its competitiveness in payment processing. Moreover, PayPal’s USD stablecoin PYUSD aligns well with Stripe’s crypto strategy.

For Stripe, this acquisition would be more than just scale expansion; it would be a strategic move to fill gaps in infrastructure and traffic entry points.

Cash-rich Stripe, the delayed bell-ringer

Despite its rising valuation and solid financials, Stripe has no immediate IPO plans.

Although Stripe has long met the conditions for going public and has hired major investment banks like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan to advise on future listing plans, it has yet to press the IPO button, which seems out of sync with the recent IPO boom in the capital markets.

The most direct confidence comes from Stripe’s strong financial health.

Unlike many companies that turn to public markets for funding, Stripe is already profitable with stable positive cash flow. Its daily operations, expansion, and acquisitions are funded by its own cash flow and private financing. As for early investors and employee liquidity needs, Stripe offers phased exits through tender offers and secondary market share transfers, allowing partial liquidity without going public. This somewhat reduces the urgency for an IPO.

More importantly, being private offers strategic flexibility.

According to Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, public companies often prioritize “harvesting,” whereas staying private allows more resources and time to focus on infrastructure, long-term investments, and product development, rather than quarterly earnings and expectations management.

Over the past six years, Stripe has consistently allocated a higher proportion of revenue to R&D than most peers. In 2025 alone, it released over 350 product updates. It also builds moats through acquisitions and ecosystem expansion, such as the recent acquisition of Metronome, which is expected to reach $1 billion in annual revenue this year.

This logic is especially crucial at this stage of growth. Stripe is still in an expansion cycle, requiring continuous investment in R&D, product innovation, strategic acquisitions, and global deployment. Particularly in high-investment, long-cycle, and uncertain fields like AI and stablecoins, these may not generate immediate profits.

If Stripe were to go public now, its strategic rhythm would inevitably be influenced by earnings cycles, with short-term profit fluctuations possibly being overinterpreted, and market sentiment potentially impacting organizational decisions and investments.

A more pragmatic reason is that, after two years of valuation resets in the global fintech industry, rushing to IPO might not fetch ideal pricing. It’s better to focus on the business itself rather than cycle risks.

Of course, delaying IPOs is not without risks. Tender offers and share buybacks only provide phased liquidity and cannot replace a transparent, ongoing exit mechanism in the long term. Employees and early investors still need a clear, stable liquidity channel. Moreover, future technological trends, regulatory environments, and competitive landscapes can change rapidly. When Stripe decides to go public, the capital market may not offer the same premiums.

Stablecoins and AI Agents: Stripe’s new ambitions

As traditional payments mature, Stripe is accelerating its evolution into the financial operating system of the internet economy, aiming to seize the next financial track. Stablecoins and AI Agents are emerging as Stripe’s two major new engines.

Stripe’s enthusiasm for crypto is not fleeting. It first supported Bitcoin payments in 2015 but shut down due to immature infrastructure; it returned to crypto payments in 2022 and has since promoted stablecoin services like USDC.

Over the past year, Stripe has made several moves in crypto, including acquiring the stablecoin platform Bridge, which saw transaction volume triple last year; acquiring Privy, supporting 110 million programmable wallets; and partnering with Paradigm to launch the scalable blockchain Tempo, emphasizing sub-second settlement, enterprise-level payment channels, privacy options, and interoperability with compliance systems.

In its 2025 annual report, Stripe states that despite the crypto winter, stablecoins are experiencing a summer. Stablecoin payment transactions doubled to about $400 billion, with an estimated 60% for B2B payments.

With the rise of AI agents, Stripe is also targeting machine-based payments. It believes AI Agents are gradually becoming independent economic entities, capable of autonomously handling payments, subscriptions, and capital allocation. A large volume of AI-driven transactions will emerge, but current financial infrastructure is not designed for machine-to-machine (M2M) payments. Supporting this new economic activity requires rebuilding underlying clearing networks, with stablecoins and high-throughput blockchains playing key roles.

“The core reason Stripe is heavily betting on USDC now is related to this,” John Collison said in a recent interview. “Tempo is needed because the future world requires a highly scalable blockchain, and existing blockchains are limited in scalability due to technical trade-offs. Our philosophy is: not only humans need this capability, but AI Agents do too. So Tempo is one of our most strategic layouts in this field.”

To prepare for the AI-driven business era, Stripe is also pushing forward its AI initiatives. Over the past year, it has collaborated with OpenAI to develop the open standard Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), establishing shared technical language between AI platforms and merchants, supporting programmable commerce flows and instant checkout; launching the Agentic Commerce Suite, Shared Payment Tokens, and a preview of the x402 protocol for machine payments.

Stripe sees these not as fringe experiments but as infrastructure with “intergenerational impact potential,” betting on universal interoperability and open design as core principles.

Thus, this billion-dollar unicorn’s ambitions to capture the next wave of internet economy growth are increasingly clear.