B2B payments platform Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have submitted a joint proposal to buy PayPal for about $53.4 billion. TechCrunch reported the offer was made early this month and the pair had arranged about $50 billion in financing. If the deal goes through, the two would split ownership of PayPal evenly. PayPal has not made a public comment on the proposal.

Visa and Mastercard are both investing aggressively in stablecoins as a new growth engine, but their approaches differ sharply, fintech and payments expert Tom Noyes said. Mastercard is pursuing a centralised ownership model through acquisitions such as BVNK, while Visa is expanding an ecosystem via partners and stablecoin-linked card programmes. Noyes said Visa\'s distributed model could be more advantageous by generating more value-added services revenue per unit of stablecoin volume.