Stripe’s $1.1B acquisition: Implications for Solana and crypto VC
Stablecoins might be the killer non-bitcoin use case for crypto
Stanislaw Mikulski/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
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News has slowly been trickling out that Stripe acquired the stablecoin platform Bridge for a reported $1.1 billion.
The acquisition is among the biggest ever in crypto, and it gave some credence to the idea that stablecoins — which provide crucial liquidity for crypto markets and show promise for making TradFi more efficient — might be the killer non-bitcoin use case for crypto.
The story also comes a few days after Stripe formally announced it had re-enabled crypto payments in the US with stablecoins.
At risk of adding more noise to an already-crowded news event, here are three quick takes on the deal, starting with its implications for Solana.
1. Solana isn’t alone in betting on stablecoins
Stablecoins show promise for things like money transfers and payments — as opposed to more store of value cryptocurrencies like bitcoin — and Solana’s north star of being fast and cheap makes the blockchain an intuitively good fit for stables.
As a result, Solana has seen a lot of stablecoin bets in recent months. A good chunk of change was spent in liquidity incentives to bring PayPal’s stablecoin to Solana. New startups like Perena, Sphere and Lulo are building Solana-native businesses largely focused on stables. Stablecoins are a sizable market, but they aren’t broadly used in the mainstream financial world yet, and whether these bets will all pay off is an open question.
But Stripe buying Bridge at least indicates that Solana isn’t the only venue taking the dive on stables.
“All payment and [infrastructure] providers will be following [Stripe’s] lead or at least begin looking around,” Lulo co-founder Jesse Brauner told me in a text.
2. Building a stablecoin payments platform is really hard
I just hosted Coinflow’s CEO and founder Daniel Lev on the Lightspeed podcast, and he made an interesting point about this deal: Stripe is not made up of dinosaurs. The behemoth fintech company got interested in bitcoin a decade ago, and it built out some payments infrastructure between 2014 and 2018.
This time around, Stripe reintegrated crypto payments presumably by way of this very expensive acquisition. As an existing internet payments company, you’d think Stripe would have at least considered building stablecoin on- and off-ramp services in house.
“You can’t just spin it up overnight,” Lev said of stablecoin payments businesses. “There is this regulatory and partnership moat where you have to meet a ton of [criteria], so it’s not like a bunch of developers can just rush on this opportunity today or tomorrow. They have to do a ton of things to even launch a compliant and legal product in the space.”
3. More M&A could open up crypto venture
One of crypto venture’s biggest problems is that crypto startups rarely IPO. If VCs want to report returns, they can rely on token allocations, but airdrops being the only exit opportunity for venture capital can cause short-term thinking and bad price action. With the Stripe buy, Bridge just proved there could be a second way for VCs to exit their investments.
“Everyone in crypto VC knows that it would be much healthier for the industry as a whole to have two viable paths to exit — i.e. equity-based (IPOs, acquisitions) and token launches+listing,” Sam Lehman, principal at Symbolic Capital, said in a text.
Another consequence of crypto venture’s token reliance is that crypto VCs tend to be leery of investing in startups that don’t plan to launch a token, Lehman added. Following the Stripe acquisition, this stance is beginning to soften.
“To be clear, it’s not a silver bullet. Web2 VCs don’t make their livings off of acquisitions, they need IPOs to get their 100x returns. I don’t think anyone thinks this means that the NYSE is going to start teeing up crypto IPOs after this, but it is a step in the right direction,” Lehman said.
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