Global payments firm Stripe is scaling its stablecoin card business worldwide, betting that digital dollars can serve as an additional way for consumers and businesses to pay alongside traditional currencies.

Henri Stern, CEO and co-founder of crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, which Stripe acquired last year, has taken on an additional role overseeing stablecoins and crypto across Stripe, the company told CoinDesk. Stripe expects its stablecoin card programs to reach more than 100 countries by the end of the year, Stern said in an interview with CoinDesk. Current customers include crypto exchange Kraken, fintech Ramp and payments app Morse.

The expansion comes as stablecoin cards emerge as a fast-growing corner of the $300 billion-plus digital dollar market. Stablecoins are blockchain-based tokens pegged to a reference asset, most commonly the U.S. dollar, and card programs act as the connective layer that lets holders spend those balances through existing card acceptance networks. About $1.2 billion of stablecoins were spent through cards last month, according to Paymentscan, triple the amount recorded a year earlier. While that remains a fraction of the global card payments market, the figures indicate that stablecoins are increasingly being used beyond crypto trading and cross-border transfers moving into everyday purchases. The year-end country target gives the rollout a concrete checkpoint, with monthly spending figures offering a way to gauge whether usage broadens alongside the geographic footprint.

Stablecoins as a Payments Alternative, Not a Replacement

Stripe's approach is to plug stablecoins into infrastructure it already operates, Stern told CoinDesk. The company has issued more than 400 million cards and processed hundreds of billions of dollars in card volume since 2018, he said. Its stablecoin offering combines that issuing business with Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2024.

For a company such as Ramp, that could mean taking a corporate card into new countries using stablecoins instead of rebuilding banking and payments connections market by market. Kraken, meanwhile, has explored letting customers spend from accounts where they already hold digital assets.

Stripe has been assembling the pieces for a broader blockchain payments push. After buying Bridge and Privy, it also partnered with crypto investment firm Paradigm to develop Tempo, a blockchain designed for payments. Stripe is also a founding investor in Open Standard, the company developing Open USD, a stablecoin that aims to challenge Circle's USDC and Tether's USDT. Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams recently moved to run Open Standard full time.

Stern said those products are meant to work closely together without locking customers into Stripe's ecosystem.

"If you're using Stripe, Bridge, Privy, Tempo, Open USD, it should be absolutely amazing, and it should feel like these systems were built to exist together," he said.