Stripe’s Trillion-Dollar Bet: How Stablecoins Eat Global Payments | Founder of Bridge Zach Abrams

Bankless

[email protected]

Tech News, News, Technology

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2025

⏱️ 92 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Zach Abrams—co-founder of Bridge, acquired by Stripe—joins Ryan to unpack Stripe’s stablecoin strategy and why tokenized dollars are poised to devour global payments. We cover Bridge’s sale to Stripe, how “fiat L1 / stablecoin L2” rails unlock faster, cheaper cross-border payouts (from startups to government aid), the case for many issuer- and app-specific stablecoins with better yield sharing, and what the Tempo chain targets for payment-scale throughput, privacy, and finality. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🎩DEGEN | JOIN THE COMMUNITY https://bankless.cc/degen ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:28 Zach’s Founder Arc 15:47 Fintech x Crypto Convergence 18:55 Founding Bridge in the Dark Times 22:42 Traditional Payment Inefficiencies 26:21 Bridge 101 42:00 Traditional Bank Pushback 42:17 Stablecoin Treasuries 50:22 Post-Genius Stablecoin Market 59:27 Fintech in 5 years 1:05:01 Tempo L1 1:13:30 Too Many Blockchains 1:17:25 Exiting TradFi 1:20:49 Getting Stablecoins to Trillions 1:25:28 Stripe x Crypto 1:29:44 AI Stablecoin Users 1:32:32 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Zach Abrams https://x.com/zcabrams Tempo https://tempo.xyz/ Bridge https://www.bridge.xyz/ Stripe https://stripe.com/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You send a staple coin over a blockchain and, you know, you could see when it was sent.
0:06.3	You could see when it was confirmed.
0:07.5	You could see when it was delivered.
0:08.7	You could see that it's not.
0:10.1	Just very basic things that, you know, in addition to costs and, you know, things that are more complicated, that made us believe that this was a better that that money
0:22.8	would be tokenized at some point in time people businesses fintech banks would see the value
0:31.0	and using this emergent payment rail and we were building for that future.
0:45.3	Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance.
0:50.6	This is Ryan Sean Adams. It's just me today, David Zell. So I'm here to help you become more bankless. Every company in FinTech is about to go through what I'm calling a
0:56.2	crypto transformation. Stripe is one of those companies. It's a $90 billion private
1:02.6	payments company behemoth, a company that does 1.3 of global GDP's worth of payments volume
1:09.7	every single year. They're definitely at the frontier of
1:12.9	this crypto transformation. They're moving quite quickly. They've invested big in stable coins,
1:18.4	and I think after the genius bill has just been signed, they are doubling down in a big way.
1:23.6	Zach Abrams is leading part of that transformation at Stripe.
1:33.6	Stripe just bought his stable coin company, a company called Bridge, for over $1 billion, about a year ago.
1:38.4	And they've made more crypto acquisitions since companies like Privy have been among them.
1:46.4	This conversation with Zach is a glimpse into how big fintech companies think about this transformation, how they're going to evolve in the future. And it's a different perspective than the crypto-native one that we
1:51.5	typically have on bankless. That's why it's so valuable for us to hear. It's also the story of Zach,
1:58.1	who's this tenacious entrepreneur who had this thesis around stable coins and persevered with that thesis, built this company through some very dark times leading to this major acquisition.
2:10.1	Now, shortly after recording this episode, Stripe launched some details on a layer one that they are sponsoring.
2:16.2	People are calling this the Stripe Layer 1. There are
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from [email protected], and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of [email protected] and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.