Stripe charges merchants 1.5% to accept stablecoins, plus 0.5% on FX where it applies. That single line is the most important data point in stablecoin payments right now. The underlying rails settle for fractions of a cent. The take rate Stripe is charging is interchange-shaped, sitting on infrastructure the issuers were told would commoditise payments. The capture is happening one layer up from the chain, at the regulated PSP.
Stripe has spent eighteen months assembling the rest of the stack to defend that capture. Bridge, acquired for $1.1 billion in October 2024, gave Stripe a regulated stablecoin orchestration layer with money-transmitter licences across 22 US states. In February 2026 the OCC granted Bridge conditional approval for a national trust bank charter, which would let it issue stablecoins, custody digital assets and manage reserves under federal supervision. Bridge sits in the same charter queue as Circle, Ripple and Paxos, so the federal pathway is shared territory. Stripe’s edge is what it has built around Bridge.
Open Issuance, Tempo and a chain co-launched by incumbents
Bridge’s Open Issuance platform, launched in October 2025, lets any business issue its own branded stablecoin and capture the reserve yield. Sui used it to mint USDsui in November 2025. MetaMask, Phantom and the Hyperliquid-native USDH have all moved onto the platform. The product attacks the most economically valuable part of Circle’s franchise, which is the issuance monopoly on regulated dollar stablecoins distributed at scale. Open Issuance separates issuance from distribution, and Stripe sits at the distribution end.
The same month Stripe and Paradigm closed a $500 million Series A at a $5 billion valuation for Tempo, an EVM-compatible L1 with sub-second finality, fees paid in stablecoins, and no native token. Tempo went live on mainnet in March 2026 alongside the Machine Payments Protocol for AI-agent transactions. The validator set is the informative piece. Visa, Stripe, Zodia Custody (Standard Chartered’s digital-asset arm) and MoneyGram are named validators. Design partners include Mastercard, Deutsche Bank, Revolut, Nubank, Shopify, OpenAI and Anthropic. This is a payments chain co-launched by the existing payments incumbents to keep settlement inside their orbit.
Circle is defending its own flank with Arc
Circle’s response is its own L1. Arc raised $222 million in a presale at a $3 billion fully-diluted valuation, with investors including a16z crypto, BlackRock, Apollo and Standard Chartered Ventures. The Q1 2026 distribution-cost line tells the strategic stakes. Circle paid $907.9 million to Coinbase in 2024, roughly 90% of total distribution expense. Coinbase keeps 100% of reserve income on USDC held on its platform and 50% of reserve income generated elsewhere. A stablecoin issuer that does not own its distribution layer ends up paying away the reserve yield, and Circle has stopped pretending the Coinbase split is sustainable. USDC supply still grew to $77 billion in Q1 2026 and on-chain volume rose 263% year on year, but the margin captured per dollar of float continues to compress.
The competitive map also includes Mastercard, which agreed to buy BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, the largest stablecoin-focused M&A on record. The card networks have been marked down 18-23% on stablecoin disintermediation fears, and Mastercard is buying the rail it cannot build inside Stripe’s stack. Visa has chosen a different path: a Tempo validator, a Tempo design partner, and the launch partner for Bridge-issued stablecoin-linked cards planned for over 100 countries. Visa is embedding inside the Stripe stack and collecting interchange there. The unbundling story plays out at the issuer level, where Circle and Tether are squeezed between the PSP take rate and the GENIUS Act compliance cost.
Three signals to watch through the rest of 2026
Bridge’s OCC trust charter has to convert from conditional to operational; until it does, Bridge runs on its state money-transmitter footprint, which costs more to maintain and limits product launch speed. Tempo TPV by validator needs to show that Visa and MoneyGram drive most of the volume; if the chain ends up dominated by Stripe’s own merchant traffic plus a few card-network nodes, it functions as a private settlement venue dressed in permissionless clothing. The third signal is the growth split between Circle’s USYC tokenized money-market fund and USDC. If USYC compounds faster, Circle is conceding that the high-margin product is the MMF token and the stablecoin is the loss-leader on the way to the parking-fund. Stripe will keep collecting 1.5% on the rail either way.