Bridge

Bridge is a stablecoin payments infrastructure company that provides developer APIs for global money movement. Founded in 2022 by Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, it was acquired by Stripe in early 2025 for $1.1 billion—at the time Stripe's largest acquisition ever and one of the most significant deals in crypto fintech history.

The Problem Bridge Solves

Moving money internationally is slow, expensive, and fragmented. Stablecoins offer compelling improvements in speed, cost, and coverage, but building directly on blockchains requires managing compliance, gas fees, custody, and local liquidity—complexity most businesses have no interest in handling. Bridge sits between application developers and the blockchain layer, providing a clean API surface so teams can integrate stablecoin payments without touching wallets, private keys, or protocol infrastructure.

How It Works

Bridge's infrastructure is organized around five composable product modules:

Orchestration is the core routing layer. A single API call can accept a payment in fiat or a stablecoin, convert it, and disburse it in a different currency or on a different chain. Transfers settle in minutes rather than days. Bridge maintains relationships with local payment providers—such as Bitso in Mexico and Yellow Card in Africa—to handle stablecoin-to-fiat conversion in local markets.

Wallets enable custodial wallet creation and management at scale. Bridge handles key management and security so applications can create wallets for thousands of users without building custodial infrastructure in-house.

Issuance is a toolkit for launching branded stablecoins. Reserves are invested in US Treasuries, generating approximately 3–4% annually. Bridge handles the on-chain mechanics, redemption, and compliance obligations.

Cards provide stablecoin-backed Visa card programs integrated with Stripe Issuing. Users can spend directly from stablecoin balances at any Visa-accepting merchant.

Customers handles KYC and KYB identity verification for onboarding end users and businesses, with full lifecycle management built in.

Supported Assets and Chains

Bridge supports the leading B2B stablecoins: USDC (Circle), USDT (Tether), PYUSD (PayPal), and EURc (Circle's euro stablecoin). Custom stablecoin issuance is also supported through the Issuance module.

Supported blockchains include Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, Tron, and Stellar.

Fit in the Solana Ecosystem

Solana is one of Bridge's primary settlement chains. Stripe's stablecoin payout infrastructure—built on Bridge and live in 70+ countries as of 2025—settles USDC on Solana, Ethereum, or Polygon at the merchant's choice, making Bridge a meaningful USDC settlement layer on Solana at institutional scale.

Bridge also has a direct customer relationship with Phantom, the leading Solana wallet, which uses Bridge to power its global money movement features. Phantom's partnership with both Stripe and Bridge is cited by the company as a flagship use case for cross-border financial infrastructure built on stablecoins.

Regulatory Status

Bridge has secured MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) authorization and EMI (Electronic Money Institution) authorization across all 27 EU member states, enabling compliant stablecoin payment operations throughout the European Union.

Team and Funding

Zach Abrams (CEO) and Sean Yu (CTO) co-founded Bridge together. Both previously co-founded Evenly, an early peer-to-peer payments app sold to Block (then Square) in 2013. Abrams went on to lead consumer products at Coinbase and held senior roles at Brex; Yu was a staff engineer at Airbnb. Their shared background shaped Bridge's product philosophy: build the infrastructure layer that lets financial applications skip straight to product development.

Bridge raised $58 million in total before its acquisition, including a $40 million Series A in mid-2024 led by Sequoia Capital and Ribbit Capital at a $200 million valuation. By August 2024, Bridge's annualized payment volume run rate exceeded $5 billion—exceptional traction for a roughly 45-person company.

Stripe announced the $1.1 billion acquisition on October 20, 2024; the deal closed in February 2025. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison described stablecoins as "room-temperature superconductors for financial services," signaling Bridge's central role in Stripe's global payments strategy going forward.

Notable Clients

Bridge's customer roster includes Phantom, Klarna, Shopify, MetaMask, and Chipper Cash, among hundreds of teams according to the company.