Stripe Acquires Crypto Wallet Provider Privy to Expand Stablecoin Stack
On Wednesday, payments giant Stripe announced it is acquiring Privy, a leading provider of crypto wallet infrastructure. Let's have a look at the synergies.
Fiodar Yuzhyk
June 13, 2026
New acquisition: On Wednesday, payments giant Stripe announced it is acquiring Privy, a leading provider of crypto wallet infrastructure. While financial terms were not disclosed, the deal comes just months after Privy raised a fresh funding round in March 2025.
Why it matters: This marks Stripe’s second acquisition in the stablecoin space, following its $1.1 billion purchase of Bridge in October 2024. While Bridge helps businesses send stablecoins easily, Privy addresses the receiving side: holding and managing digital assets in a compliant, user-friendly way.
“Money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world’s best programmable vaults,” said Stripe co-founder John Collison. “Alongside our other stablecoin work, we’re looking forward to enabling a new generation of global, internet-native financial services.”
Embedded wallet technology: Founded in 2021, Privy enables developers to embed non-custodial crypto wallets directly into their applications. Instead of redirecting users to external wallet apps like MetaMask, Privy allows them to create and manage wallets using familiar Web2 sign-in methods like email or OAuth — with private keys stored securely in the background.
Stripe x Privy synergies: The acquisition gives Stripe a native wallet layer that could be deployed across its stablecoin, payments, and identity products. In the future:
Merchants can seamlessly offer crypto wallets to their customers.
Consumer fintech apps can embed stablecoin wallets directly via Stripe’s APIs, enabling programmable money flows.
Gig platforms can hold and manage balances for freelancers — without taking on the regulatory burden of becoming a financial institution.
Privy’s traction: According to the company, Privy’s SDK is now used by over 1,000 developer teams and powers more than 75 million wallets. Its breakout moment came in August 2023 through its integration with FriendTech. Since then, Privy has become the go-to embedded wallet stack for crypto-native apps like Farcaster, Hyperliquid, and Blackbird.
Next step: The acquisition is expected to close in the coming weeks. Privy will continue to operate as an independent product.
With Bridge and now Privy, Stripe is assembling the full stack for internet-native money. Bridge handles the money movement, Privy lets apps give each user a self-custodied wallet that feels like a regular Web2 login.
In the future, any platform can offer users a stablecoin balance — without running custody infrastructure and managing blockchain complexity.
For Privy, it’s a smart move. Their SDK already won over the crypto-native crowd, now Stripe will turbocharge their distribution, embedding wallets into the real-world fabric of global commerce.
Karl-Martin Ahrend is a Founding Partner at Areta, a leading crypto-native investment bank offering services in M&A, capital raising, secondaries, and strategic governance. The firm works with entities such as the Arbitrum and Uniswap DAO.
Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge was plug-and-play. Privy is more exploratory, more crypto-native which is a bullish signal for crypto venture.
From our own conversations, it’s clear that many large payment companies have built dedicated internal teams and have been closely tracking the space since the Bridge deal. With Privy now joining Stripe, that quiet observation is turning into real urgency. Yet the pool of viable acquisition targets remains limited — players like BVNK, Conduit, Mesh, or Noah — and ironically, many of them have just raised new rounds, just like Privy.
Maybe that's also why we can already see the ripple effects in venture. More founders are now building for this orchestration layer — especially around FX corridors and cross-border flows. The stack is beginning to take shape.