Stripe's acquisitions of Bridge and Privy follow the Google playbook (e.g., YouTube, Android) rather than the Oracle model. The goal is not to absorb a mature product but to acquire a high-potential team and technology to build a new, strategic business pillar from an early stage.

MercadoLibre built its payment system, MercadoPago, out of necessity in a market lacking a trusted digital payment solution. This created a powerful, integrated commerce and payments flywheel that fueled adoption and established a moat that competitors like Amazon struggled to overcome.

Major tech and fintech players, including Apple, Google, and Stripe, have opted to integrate with Visa's network rather than build a competing one from scratch. This dynamic turns potential disruptors into partners, reinforcing Visa's deep moat and demonstrating the prohibitively high cost of replicating its global infrastructure.

Bryan Johnson reveals his strategy for Braintree was to first capture the merchant side of the payments market with top-tier clients like Uber and Airbnb. Once that was established, he acquired Venmo to instantly gain the consumer side, completing the two-sided marketplace without the immense cost of building it from scratch.

Stripe is reportedly considering an acquisition of PayPal, which is trading down 85% from its peak despite strong cash flow and a massive user base. Such a deal would unite two payments behemoths, creating a powerful entity but also raising immediate and significant antitrust questions from regulators.

The acquisition of crypto on-ramp Bridge by payment giant Stripe served as a credible signal to the market. It forced competitors to pay immediate attention and treat stablecoin infrastructure as a critical area for investment, arguably triggering the subsequent flurry of institutional activity.

Unlike networks such as Visa that strive for neutrality, Stripe's launch of its own blockchain, Tempo, is an opinionated play. This forces other payment service providers into a dilemma: using Tempo means actively helping their biggest competitor, Stripe, build a moat and capture more of the value chain.

Stripe intentionally designed its Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to be provider-agnostic, working with any payments processor and any AI agent. This strategic decision to build an open standard, rather than a proprietary product, aims to grow the entire agentic commerce ecosystem instead of creating a walled garden.

The system of charging retailers an interchange fee (around 1.8%) that is then passed to consumers as rewards (around 1.57%) creates a strong network effect. Consumers are incentivized to use rewards cards, and retailers cannot easily offer discounts for other payment methods, locking both parties into the ecosystem.