some thoughts on the Bridge acquisition by Stripe: After operation chokepoint (which @nic_carter and @micsolana did a great job exposing), there was a gap in the market for converting between fiat and stablecoins. Bridge bridged (lol) this gap. @zcabrams has built an incredible team, tapping people from many of the best fintechs. While bridge initially focused on stablecoin issuance before shifting towards "orchestration" which is a fancy way to say swapping between stables. Stripe is mostly known for its payments processing and is viewed as one of the sharpest organizations in payments. Stripe has a long and complicated history with crypto involving both many false starts as well as some large wins. They were an early and large investor in Stellar. What's leaving many insiders scratching their heads around this transaction is the price tag (1.1b against 15m in revenue) as Circle's is expected to IPO at ~5b and has 750m in revenue. Circle is the issuer of USDC, one of the top two stablecoins today by all metrics (34.84b fdv). Why does Stripe, which could feasibly buy either, perceive Bridge to be worth 22% of Circle? Stablecoins eating emerging market fiat and payments has become a consensus narrative. What isn't obvious is what parts of the stack (if any) can drive venture scale returns. On the surface, it appears that Stripe is betting aggressively on value accruing to the conversion layer over the issuance layer. Players like @withAUSD and @OndoFinance are already putting pressure on the economics of legacy issuers and other fintechs like Paypal are entering the fray, using existing distribution to elbow their way into market share. While we can only speculate on the business logic behind this, the transaction is clearly predicated on a belief in unbridled, global stablecoin growth.