Stripe plans stablecoin cards in 100-plus countries by year-end as monthly card spend hits $1.2 billion, triple a year ago

Stripe expects its stablecoin card programs to reach more than 100 countries by the end of the year, Henri Stern, the company's new head of stablecoins and crypto, told CoinDesk. Stern, the co-founder of wallet company Privy, which Stripe bought in 2025, took on the role in addition to running Privy. Current customers include the exchange Kraken, the spend-management company Ramp and the payments app Morse.

What a stablecoin card is

Per CoinDesk, the cards combine Stripe's card issuing business with Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe bought for $1.1 billion in 2024. The holder spends from a balance held in digital dollars. For a company such as Ramp, CoinDesk says, that could mean launching a corporate card in a new country on stablecoins instead of building banking and payments connections market by market. Stern said Stripe has issued more than 400 million cards since 2018 and processed hundreds of billions of dollars in card volume, and that it intends to stay "completely stablecoin agnostic, completely blockchain agnostic."

The size of it

CoinDesk cites the data firm Paymentscan for about $1.2 billion of stablecoins spent through cards last month, triple the amount a year earlier. That implies about $400 million in the same month of 2025 (our arithmetic from "triple"). CoinDesk's own framing is that this remains a fraction of the global card market, and it places the figure inside a digital dollar market of more than $300 billion. We could not find, in the article, the global card volume it compares against, so we do not state a share.

What the reports do not say

Nothing in the CoinDesk piece says how a merchant is paid when a customer taps a stablecoin card, what it costs the merchant, or whether acceptance differs from an ordinary card. Our earlier report on Citi and Coinbase's stablecoin payments covered one design in which merchants never hold the coins, but that is a different product, and nothing here should be read as describing Stripe's. For a business owner the practical situation today is that the change is on the issuing side. Stripe is also, per CoinDesk, backing Tempo, a payments blockchain built with Paradigm, and is a founding investor in Open Standard, the company behind the Open USD stablecoin we covered in Open USD goes live.

Stern also said Stripe is exploring tokenized deposits, decentralized finance use cases and accepting more digital assets as payment, though "by and far, the bulk of our work happens with stablecoins." Live prices and the stablecoin market are on crypto prices.

Sources: CoinDesk, October 2026 (interview with Henri Stern; Paymentscan data). This rests on one specialist outlet and Stripe's own statements; we have not seen a Stripe announcement. This is market information, not investment advice.