[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Stripe, a B2B payments platform company, has now become a familiar name in crypto as well. Stripe has gone beyond stablecoin payments and has even rolled out its own blockchain mainnet, Tempo. At this point, Stripe is enough to be called a crypto company.

But Stripe's strategy is far from putting crypto front and center. It is pursuing a crypto strategy in which end users do not need to use words such as blockchain, wallet, gas fees or bridge.

James Smith (제임스 스미스), ecosystem head at the Ethereum Foundation, sums up the strategy by saying Stripe is not trying to become a crypto company but is attempting a strategy to remove crypto.

In a post shared recently on social media X (Twitter), he said, "Stripe is trying to melt crypto deep into corporate payment infrastructure so customers do not have to use the words wallet, gas, bridge or chain even once. Stablecoins and blockchains exist like plumbing."

Stripe's moves over the past 18 months make the company's strategy clearer. Stripe acquired stablecoin orchestration company Bridge for $1.1 billion in October 2024. In June 2025, it bought wallet infrastructure company Privy. In March 2026, it opened the Tempo mainnet, a blockchain dedicated to corporate payments. Stripe's stablecoin subsidiary also received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in February 2026 to establish a national trust bank.

This offers a glimpse of Stripe's strategy. Tempo takes charge of the payment settlement layer. Stablecoins serve as gas fees, and there is no separate token. By not using shared blockspace, it guarantees predictable speed and fees for corporate payments.

Smith said, "There is a background to why Tempo was made. Once, during a memecoin boom, a Bridge customer waited more than 12 hours for a payment on one of the major blockchains and the per-transaction fee jumped 35 times. The conclusion was that you cannot run institutional payments on a chain with speculative traffic."

Bridge handles stablecoin issuance and orchestration. Phantom, Klarna, Hyperliquid and MetaMask have all issued their own stablecoins based on Bridge. Bridge handles reserves, compliance, issuance and burning, and provides most of the reserve yield to issuers. Stripe is focused on owning the platform where coins are created, held, exchanged, settled and regulated.

Wallets are Privy's domain. Privy held 110 million programmable payments as of 2025. On the consumer side, Stripe has its one-click payment service Link. 250 million consumers can store stablecoins through Link.

Smith said, "When Meta pays stablecoins to creators in the Philippines or Colombia, recipients receive them inside Link. They log in with email and see their balance. Neither a wallet address nor a chain is visible. The narrative of removing crypto operates on both the merchant and consumer sides. Merchants see their Stripe balance, and consumers see Link."

Stripe's existing revenue structure is based on fees that come from card networks whenever Visa or Mastercard card payments occur. Stripe processes payments between merchants and card networks and takes a share of the fee.

If payments are made in stablecoins on Tempo, there is no need to go through card networks. That could reduce Stripe's existing revenue. Stripe is accelerating its crypto strategy even knowing this.

It is because what matters is not card or stablecoin, but ensuring that both card and stablecoin payments pass through Stripe's infrastructure. Smith said, "If an AI agent makes a payment using a card token with Stripe's MPP protocol, Stripe receives card fees as it does now. If the same agent pays with stablecoins, settlement happens directly on Tempo without going through card networks. But the place where the merchant ultimately receives the money is still inside Stripe. Even if the payment method shifts from card to stablecoins, that change does not happen outside Stripe but inside Stripe." That means it is not a competitor replacing Stripe, but Stripe replacing itself.

Smith said, "Most companies want new technology to arrive slowly while protecting existing revenue. Stripe is the opposite. It created something that cannibalises its existing card business itself, but designed it so the new payment flow still ends within the Stripe system," adding, "The question is not whether Stripe becomes crypto-native, but whether crypto becomes Stripe-native before companies notice the difference." He meant the key point to watch is whether a scenario in which companies end up paying based on crypto without realising it is built first inside Stripe.