Stripe’s voracious appetite for crypto infrastructure continues unabated, with the payments giant announcing its acquisition of Privy, a New York-based wallet infrastructure startup that has quietly powered over 75 million accounts since its 2021 founding by Henri Stern and Asta Li.
This latest move follows Stripe’s jaw-dropping $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge earlier in 2025, suggesting the company views crypto integration not as a speculative venture but as an inevitable evolution of digital payments.
Privy’s embedded wallet technology addresses one of cryptocurrency’s most persistent friction points: the Byzantine complexity of wallet setup and management.
Rather than forcing users through the digital equivalent of assembling IKEA furniture blindfolded (the traditional MetaMask experience), Privy allows developers to seamlessly integrate crypto wallets directly into applications. The approach contrasts sharply with traditional browser extensions like MetaMask that require separate installation and configuration steps.
The result is a streamlined onboarding process that has attracted clients including Blackbird and Toku, who leverage the platform for various digital asset transactions.
The strategic rationale becomes clearer when examining Privy’s impressive metrics—billions in transaction volume processing through infrastructure that most consumers never directly encounter.
This white-label approach reflects a broader trend toward invisible fintech, where the most successful companies operate as the plumbing rather than the faucet.
Privy’s recent $15 million funding round, led by Ribbit Capital and including Coinbase Ventures, brought total capital raised to over $40 million against a March valuation of $230 million according to PitchBook.
The acquisition accelerates Stripe’s ambitious goal of creating seamless fiat-crypto integration, positioning the company to capitalize on what many believe represents the next phase of internet-native financial services. The move strategically complements Stripe’s stablecoin financial accounts that were introduced in May 2025.
By maintaining Privy as an independent product within its ecosystem, Stripe demonstrates unusual restraint—a recognition that successful crypto infrastructure often requires specialized focus rather than corporate homogenization.
This dual acquisition strategy reveals Stripe’s calculated bet on the evolving cryptoeconomy. Notably, Stripe had paused crypto offerings in 2018 before recognizing the technology’s maturation and resuming its digital asset initiatives.
While the undisclosed acquisition price for Privy likely pales compared to the Bridge deal, the combined technologies create complete end-to-end infrastructure for crypto-enabled services.
Whether this represents prescient positioning or expensive hedging remains to be seen, but Stripe’s commitment to digital asset integration appears decidedly non-negotiable.
