Stripe to extend stablecoin cards to over 100 countries by year end

Stripe plans to push its stablecoin cards business into more than 100 countries by the end of the year, according to a CoinDesk report citing an interview with the company’s new crypto head, Henri Stern. For PSPs and issuers, the important part is not the logo on the card; it’s that Stripe is packaging stablecoin issuance into its existing card and infrastructure stack.

1. Stripe’s stablecoin card offering combines its issuing business with Bridge’s stablecoin infrastructure. Stripe said its card business has issued more than 400 million cards since 2018, and Bridge was acquired by Stripe in 2024. The setup matters because it lets Stripe plug stablecoin functionality into rails it already controls, instead of building a separate product from scratch.
2. Stern is the CEO and co-founder of Privy, a crypto wallet infrastructure firm acquired last year by Stripe, and now also oversees stablecoins and crypto across Stripe. In a Monday article on X, he said he is helping set Stripe’s priorities in the space and build a stablecoin developer platform that is “open and complete, modular and cohesive, global by default.”
3. Stripe’s card business is “completely stablecoin agnostic, completely blockchain agnostic,” Stern said in the CoinDesk report. In practice, that means Stripe is positioning the product so customers can mix and match components of their stack rather than being locked into one chain or one stablecoin.
4. Visa said in March that it was expanding its partnership with Stripe-owned Bridge and extending the global card issuance product the companies introduced in 2025. At the time, the partnership had already reached 18 nations, with expansion planned to over 100 countries in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific by the end of the year.
5. Stripe also said on Wednesday, Sept. 30, that Open USD (OUSD) had joined the other stablecoin options available to businesses using Stripe’s financial infrastructure. OUSD, described by its builders as a “money movement stablecoin,” was announced on June 30 and went live on Wednesday.

The direction of travel is clear enough: Stripe is making stablecoins look less like a special case and more like just another funding and payout option inside an issuing and payments stack. For high-risk merchants and the PSPs serving them, that usually means one thing: more ways to move funds, and more dependency on how a platform decides to package the rails.