On July 15, Stripe made an offer to buy PayPal (PYPL +0.99%) for $53 billion. While PayPal has not accepted that offer as of July 22, with its board opting on July 20 to hold out for a higher price, the acquisition could still very well go through in the near future.
Crypto investors now need to reckon with what these companies have already built separately. Their combination would carry immediate consequences for XRP (XRP -2.31%), Solana (SOL -2.17%), and other coins, and would dramatically shake up the pecking order among stablecoins, with knock-on effects elsewhere. Let's analyze how this deal could change crypto's competitive landscape overnight despite neither Stripe nor PayPal being crypto-first businesses.
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The stablecoin landscape could see a tectonic shift
Stripe's foray into crypto accelerated dramatically with its launch of Tempo, a payments-first blockchain for stablecoins, on March 18. Transaction fees on the network are minimal and can be paid in any stablecoin, as there's no native token. Leading financial companies were Stripe's design partners for Tempo, including juggernauts like Visa, Mastercard, and others.
Then, on June 30, more than 140 organizations, including Stripe, Visa, and Coinbase Global, announced the upcoming launch of Open USD (OUSD), a consortium-backed stablecoin that will launch natively on Solana with additional chains to follow and that shares the reserve yield of its underlying assets with its consortium partners rather than pocketing it as is the norm with most other stablecoins.
PayPal, if it ends up being acquired, will bring the ingredients that Stripe cannot buy outright: consumers.
NASDAQ: PYPL
Key Data Points
PayPal's stablecoin, PayPal USD, has a $2.7 billion market cap, with Solana as its default payment network since February. With Stripe's 4 million merchants and PayPal's 439 million active accounts, Tempo could become the primary settlement rail for the largest non-crypto-native stablecoin distribution channel that has ever been built. That would inevitably starve a lot of new capital from cryptocurrencies that depend heavily on stablecoin transfer volume, like Tron, and probably permanently so.
What it means for XRP and Solana
The immediate thing to know is that if Stripe successfully acquires PayPal, it will likely be mildly bearish for both Solana and XRP. But, as both coins compete in a few different segments, it won't be as catastrophic for them as it might be for a chain like Tron.
XRP's original pitch, being an efficient cross-border money transfer layer, was already very questionable and perhaps even untenable before this due to increasing adoption of stablecoins. Ripple's own Ripple USD is somewhat cannibalizing the very enterprise customers in financial institutions that XRP was supposed to serve.
CRYPTO: XRP
Key Data Points
A Stripe empowered by PayPal's resources would aim Tempo at the same buyers, with orders-of-magnitude greater consumer reach. It's hard to see how XRP could compete very effectively in the stablecoin payments space if that happens. Nonetheless, the network has other ways of finding growth, such as hosting tokenized asset management activities.
Solana's exposure is less severe because it's somewhat hedged.
If a merged entity steers stablecoin flows away from Solana and toward Tempo, Solana would lose some of its share of a fast-growing category. On the other hand, if it uses Solana as the rail to reach PayPal's consumers, whether or not the PayPal stablecoin or any other stablecoin is used as the medium, Solana will win because the capital will stay on its chain. And even if Solana loses out, it still has other growth segments which won't be affected, like its expanding base of tokenized stocks on the network.
CRYPTO: SOL
Key Data Points
Even if PayPal doesn't agree to the acquisition, this move by Stripe is yet another recent sign that the big players in the traditional financial sector are making their moves to shore up their crypto infrastructure.
So far, the networks with diversified ecosystems and a collection of different capabilities, look like they'll fare much better than the one-trick ponies, as powerful new players entering their spaces are likely to muscle them out.
