Stripe is Buying PayPal for $159B

Welcome back to SavvyMonk, your dose of AI and tech news that actually matters.

Today's story is one of those that sounds made up until you realize it actually isn't. The company that PayPal once dismissed as a scrappy developer tool is now worth $159 billion and reportedly shopping to buy PayPal outright.

Let's get into it.

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There's a version of this story that reads like a revenge plot. Kind of.

Fifteen years ago, Stripe was two Irish brothers building checkout forms in San Francisco while PayPal ran the internet's financial plumbing. Today, Bloomberg is reporting that Stripe is in early talks to acquire PayPal, all of it, or parts of it, at a moment when Stripe just hit a $159 billion valuation and PayPal's stock is down roughly 85% from its peak.

PayPal's stock jumped nearly 7% the second the Bloomberg story dropped. That tells you something. Markets didn't react with scepticism. They reacted like this made complete sense.​

It kind of does.

How Did We Get Here?

Stripe's rise is well documented, but the speed of it still catches people off guard. They just completed a new employee tender offer that valued the company at $159 billion, up roughly 70% from last year. They are processing close to $2 trillion in annual payment volume. They have never gone public and don't seem in any hurry to.

PayPal's decline is less discussed but arguably more interesting. At its 2021 peak, PayPal was worth over $300 billion. Today it's worth a fraction of that. The core product didn't really change, which is precisely the problem. While PayPal was defending its turf, Apple Pay became the default checkout for half the smartphones on earth. Shopify built Shop Pay and quietly ate PayPal's lunch on e-commerce. And a generation of developers chose Stripe because its API actually made sense.​

PayPal didn't lose because it did something wrong. It lost because it stood still.

The Part of This Story Nobody Is Talking About

Here is what gets buried under the acquisition headlines, Stripe doesn't want PayPal for its checkout button. They want it for what comes next.

Last year, Stripe acquired a stablecoin startup called Bridge for $1.1 billion. At the time, a lot of people shrugged. Why is a payments company buying a crypto startup? Turns out Stripe saw something most people missed.​

A stablecoin, think USDC or USDT, is a digital dollar that lives on a blockchain. It's worth exactly one dollar, it doesn't fluctuate, and you can send it anywhere in the world in seconds for almost nothing. Compare that to a traditional international wire transfer: two to five business days, $25 to $50 in fees, and a pile of correspondent banking paperwork.

For businesses paying international contractors, settling cross-border invoices, or moving cash between subsidiaries in different countries, stablecoins aren't a crypto experiment. They are just obviously better infrastructure.​

And the numbers are starting to show it. Bridge's transaction volume more than quadrupled in 2025. Stripe's own projections now put total stablecoin payment volume through its platform at $400 billion this year, with roughly 60% of that coming from B2B transactions, the highest-margin, stickiest segment in all of payments.

The broader crypto market was cooling down all through 2025. Stripe's stablecoin volume was going vertical anyway. That divergence is the signal.

So What Does PayPal Have to Do With Any of This?

Everything, actually.

PayPal has tens of millions of active merchant accounts. It has a consumer wallet that hundreds of millions of people have used at some point. It has deep integrations baked into nearly every major e-commerce platform on the internet.​

None of that technology is impressive anymore. But all of that distribution is.

Stripe wouldn't be buying PayPal's product. They would be buying the keys to a network that took twenty years to build, and then running Bridge's rails underneath all of it. Every PayPal merchant becomes a potential stablecoin settlement endpoint. Every PayPal consumer wallet becomes an on-ramp.

That's not a fintech acquisition. That's an infrastructure play disguised as one.

The Bigger Picture

There's a quiet geopolitical angle here that doesn't get enough attention.

Most cross-border B2B payments today run through a system called SWIFT, which is deeply tied to US dollar correspondent banking, a system that gives the United States enormous leverage in international finance. Stablecoins, particularly dollar-pegged ones, could actually extend that dollar dominance into a new layer of infrastructure that traditional banks simply cannot reach.

A business in Lagos or Jakarta settling invoices in USDC is choosing dollar-denominated infrastructure without ever touching a US bank. Stripe, through Bridge, is positioning itself to be the company that runs those rails. A PayPal acquisition would give them the scale to make that positioning stick globally, fast.

Will This Actually Happen?

Honestly, nobody knows. The talks are early, and a deal of this size would face serious regulatory scrutiny. The two companies have completely different cultures, tech stacks, and internal structures. Integrating them would be a multi-year project even if everything went perfectly.

But the market's reaction was telling. When the rumour broke, investors didn't laugh it off. They bought PayPal stock. Because on some level, everyone can see that the logic holds.​

The startup that was supposed to challenge PayPal is now the one with the money, the momentum, and the vision. Whether this particular deal closes or not, that shift in gravity is real.

The Bottom Line

Stripe is trying to own the infrastructure layer underneath all of internet money.

The PayPal acquisition, if it happens, is not about market share. It is about plugging twenty years of distribution into a next-generation stablecoin payment rail that moves faster and costs less than anything the traditional banking system can offer. PayPal brings the network. Bridge brings the rails. Stripe becomes the operating system for how global business payments work.

Whether this deal closes or not, the direction is clear.

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If Stripe does buy PayPal, which part of the business do you think they gut first? Hit reply, I read every response.

See you tomorrow.

— Vivek

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