Payment pioneer PayPal may be acquired, and the rumored buyer is none other than Stripe, the unlisted payment upstart. These two representative companies of the Internet era, with two completely different payment approaches, have now embarked on different paths: one has ushered in a high valuation halo of $159.00 billion, while the other has entered a long reassessment cycle after the spotlight fades.

To date, this rising star has not yet rung the Nasdaq bell, choosing to retain the strategic freedom of being unlisted, and is accelerating its bet on stablecoins and AI, investing heavily in new financial tracks.

The reversal moment in the payment world, rumored to acquire the pioneer PayPal. In the global payment world, the wind is quietly changing. According to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, Stripe has expressed preliminary interest in potentially acquiring PayPal or its assets and is considering acquiring all or part of the company’s assets.

Not long ago, Stripe President John Collison said in an interview that “PayPal has had a pretty tough few years, and the market landscape has changed a lot, such as the rise of Apple Pay and Google Pay. I can’t talk about any M&A speculation, but they have indeed had a difficult time.” This comment added fuel to the acquisition rumors.

PayPal’s story is an epitome of the first generation of Internet finance. Starting from the eBay era, it became the absolute infrastructure for global cross-border payments. PayPal once created a generation of payment empires, with a peak market value of $360.00 billion. The PayPal mafia (such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, and other representative figures) has profoundly influenced the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial ecosystem.

However, times have changed. With the stagnation of active user growth, executive turmoil, and the strong squeeze from competitors, the stock price of this giant ship has retreated sharply, its market share has continued to shrink, and the capital market’s imagination of its future space is rapidly shrinking.

Compared to its predecessor’s stumbling steps, Stripe, founded in 2010, has caught the golden window of the mobile Internet explosion and the SaaS entrepreneurial wave. With the minimalist experience of “accessing payment with a few lines of code,” Stripe quickly opened up the situation, growing from an initial payment API tool to a full-stack infrastructure giant covering global payments, revenue growth, fund management, and compliance.

Today, this invisible money printing machine is one of the most valuable and fastest-growing unlisted technology companies in the world. According to Stripe’s 2025 annual letter, its services cover more than 5 million businesses, and the total amount of payments processed last year reached $1.90 trillion, equivalent to about 1.6% of global GDP.

And this “latecomer” recently launched an internal share repurchase with a staggering valuation of $159.00 billion, while the former big brother PayPal currently has a market value of only about $54.00 billion. The waves behind the Yangtze River push the waves ahead. If this acquisition is finally completed, it may become one of the most iconic cases in Silicon Valley history.

PayPal has more than 400 million active accounts, as well as assets such as Venmo and Braintree, which are very popular among young Americans. Once included in the territory, Stripe will complete the consumer-side puzzle and enhance its competitiveness in the payment processing market.

Not only that, PayPal’s dollar stablecoin PYUSD will also be highly compatible with Stripe’s ongoing crypto strategy. For Stripe, this acquisition may not only be a scale expansion, but also a key strategic complement, which will make up for the traffic entrance from the infrastructure.

Stripe, which is not short of money, is late to ring the bell. Stripe, which continues to climb in valuation and has a sound financial situation, has no IPO plans in the short term. Although Stripe has long had the conditions to land in the public market and has hired large investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to provide advice on future listing plans, it has never pressed the listing button, which seems out of place in the capital market’s rush to mature listing tide in the past few years.

The most direct confidence comes from Stripe’s sound financial situation. Unlike many companies that go to the public market due to financing needs, Stripe has achieved profitability and has stable positive cash flow. The funds required for daily operations, expansion, and mergers and acquisitions can be solved through its own blood production capacity and private equity financing.

As for the realization demands of early investors and employees, it provides a phased exit channel through regular tender offers and secondary market share transfers, completing some realization arrangements without going public. This weakens the urgency of the IPO to a certain extent.

More importantly, the strategic space brought by private identity. In the view of Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, listed companies usually need to prioritize “harvesting,” while remaining private means that more resources and time can be invested in infrastructure construction and long-term investment, focusing on customers and products, rather than quarterly financial reports and expectation management.

In the past six years, Stripe’s annual revenue ratio for research and development has been higher than that of most similar companies. In 2025 alone, Stripe released more than 350 product updates. At the same time, Stripe has also built a moat through acquisitions and ecological expansion, such as Metronome, which is expected to reach $1.00 billion in annualized revenue this year.

This logic is particularly important at the current stage of development. Stripe is still in an expansion cycle and needs to continue to increase investment in research and development, product innovation, strategic acquisitions, and global layout. In particular, the high-investment, long-cycle, and highly uncertain tracks such as AI and stablecoins that are accelerating their layout may not be converted into profits in the short term.

If it is listed at this time, the strategic rhythm will inevitably be driven by the financial reporting cycle, the phased fluctuations in profits may be magnified and interpreted, and the ups and downs of market sentiment may also affect organizational judgment and investment decisions in reverse. The more realistic background is that, for Stripe, the global fintech industry has experienced valuation reset in the past two years, and a rash listing may not be able to obtain an ideal pricing. Rather than bear the cyclical risk, it is better to leave the time to the business itself.

Of course, delaying does not mean there is no risk. For example, tender offers and share repurchases can only provide phased liquidity and cannot replace the continuous exit mechanism of the public market in the long term. Employees and early investors ultimately need a transparent and stable liquidity channel.

More importantly, future technology trends, regulatory environment, and competitive landscape may change at any time. When Stripe decides to come to the forefront, the capital market may not give the same premium.

Stablecoins and AI Agent, Stripe’s New Ambition With the growth of traditional payments maturing, Stripe is accelerating its evolution into a financial operating system for the Internet economy and is trying to seize the next financial track. Stablecoins and AI Agent are becoming Stripe’s two new engines.

Stripe’s enthusiasm for crypto is not a whim. As early as 2015, it was the first to support Bitcoin payments, but closed the related business due to immature infrastructure; it returned to the crypto payment track in 2022 and began to promote stablecoin businesses such as USDC two years later.

In the past year or so, Stripe has made continuous moves in the crypto track, including the acquisition of stablecoin platform Bridge for a huge sum, whose transaction volume has increased more than threefold last year; it has included Privy, which supports 110 million programmable wallets, and launched the highly scalable blockchain Tempo in conjunction with Paradigm, emphasizing sub-second settlement, enterprise-level payment channels, privacy options, and interoperability with compliance systems.

In the 2025 annual letter, Stripe bluntly stated that although the crypto market winter has not dissipated, stablecoins have ushered in the summer. Stablecoin payment transaction volume has doubled to approximately $400.00 billion, of which 60% is estimated to be B2B payments.

After the rise of AI intelligent agents, Stripe is also targeting payments for machines. Stripe believes that AI Agent is gradually becoming an independent economic entity, and will independently handle commercial activities such as payments, subscriptions, and capital allocation in the future.

A large number of AI-driven transactions will appear, but the existing financial infrastructure is not designed for “machine-to-machine” (M2M) payments. To support this new type of economic activity, the underlying clearing network must be reconstructed, and stablecoins and high-throughput blockchains will become key drivers.

“The core reason why Stripe is now investing so heavily in USDC is also related to this. Tempo is because the future world needs a highly scalable blockchain, and the scalability of existing blockchains is actually not strong under technical trade-offs. Our philosophy is: not only humans need this ability, but AI Agent needs it even more, so Tempo is one of our most core layouts in this field,” John Collison said in a recent interview.

To cope with the AI agent business era, Stripe is also vigorously promoting AI business growth. In the past year, Stripe has jointly developed the open standard Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) with OpenAI to establish a shared technical language between AI platforms and merchants, support programmatic business flows and instant checkout; and launched Agentic Commerce Suite, launched Shared Payment Tokens, and integrated a preview version of the x402 protocol machine payment system.

In Stripe’s view, these are not marginal attempts, but infrastructure with “generational impact potential,” and universal interoperability and open design are the core logic of its bet. So far, this unicorn with a value of hundreds of billions of dollars has gradually revealed its new ambition to seize the next wave of Internet economic growth.

[PANews]