One buyer would hold the coin, the rails it settles on and the checkout it runs through. Citi says that could undercut Stripe's own pledge to make OpenUSD its checkout standard.
Stripe and Advent International have offered $60.50 a share for PayPal, valuing it at more than $53 billion. The combination would gather Stripe's crypto assets and PYUSD, the dollar-backed stablecoin PayPal offers with Paxos as issuer, inside one company.
Reuters reported that PayPal's directors regard the price as below what the company is worth and expect the deal to run into difficulties over regulation and financing. The company has issued no public response to the approach, and the Financial Times reports it has shown little appetite for entering talks.
The offer is a premium of about 28% over the prior close of $47.37. Roughly $50 billion in committed bank financing stands behind it, alongside an equity portion of some $17 billion put up jointly by Stripe, Advent and Block. As framed, Stripe and Advent would hold matching stakes and own PayPal together rather than carve it up.
The two companies lodged that offer formally earlier in July, having first approached PayPal in early April 2026.
Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge, whose stablecoin APIs sit underneath that stack — at the time the largest crypto purchase by any payments company. It bought the wallet startup Privy too, for an undisclosed sum, and launched Tempo, a chain purpose-built for payments, together with the crypto venture investor Paradigm. DefiLlama put PYUSD in circulation at some $2.83 billion on the day the bid was reported, well behind Tether's USDT at some $184 billion and Circle's USDC at around $73 billion.
Citi wrote in a research note that folding PYUSD into Stripe's stack would produce the market's first private digital-dollar business integrated end to end. By the note's account, one owner would hold issuance and reserve management, the rails on which money settles and moves, and enterprise merchant processing. The same note said that could undercut Stripe's earlier pledge to make OpenUSD the standard checkout stablecoin for its merchants, since an in-house coin at the commerce layer would draw captive supply from Stripe's millions of merchants and demand from roughly 440 million PayPal consumer wallets.
Price is not the only obstacle. PayPal was worth close to $360 billion at its 2021 high point, and measured against that record some shareholders could find $60.50 a share insufficient. Stefan Deiss told The Defiant that the market share the combined company would hold makes antitrust examination unavoidable, and that stablecoin rules will determine what products such as PYUSD and Bridge can do under a single owner. Rob Hadick told CoinDesk that integrating a merger of this size would be extremely difficult.
PayPal's directors could convene as early as July 20 to consider the offer.