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Stripe and Coinbase show us how the future of commerce could look (TWIF 5/9)

Hello Fintech Friends,

Welcome to the 2,201 new readers who’ve joined us since last week. You’re joining 180,000+ other subscribers. Today's newsletter is brought to you by our friends at Newline™ by Fifth Third.

🪙 Coinbase this week announced one of the largest acquisitions in the history of crypto, its $$2.9B purchase of derivatives platform Deribit. Coinbase also released its first-quarter earnings last night.

I had a chance to sit down yesterday with Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas to get her perspective on digital currencies, trading, and what she is most excited about in the company's future. The interview is below, but I found her comments on stablecoins particularly interesting:

"Near term, we believe that stablecoins are going to be the nearest driver of revenue diversification. They clearly have seen product market fit: USDC surged to an all time high of $60 billion at the end of Q1. And we're seeing more of our customers adopt USDC. For example, over the last two years the MTUs holding USDC on our platform has doubled. The balancers per MTU has tripled. And we're seeing more and more [users] globally adopt stablecoins for payment flows. So we think that payments will be an emerging growing utility in crypto-based technology. And we think we're poised, with the products and services that we offer, to be a big participant in that space.

💳 Stripe also announced a dizzying number of new products at Stripe Sessions this week, which we'll summarize below.

💰 Startup Pitch Competition: We're hosting a competition, and you're invited! If you're building in the stablecoin space – or adjacent to it – we're partnering with Commerce Ventures to pick 8 finalists to present on-stage in front of 1,000+ people at Stablecon. The winner will also receive a $100,000 investment from Commerce.

🎤 Want to pitch? You can apply here. (Applications close EOD May 14th)

☀️ I'm also excited to share something we've wanted to launch for a long time, our new TWIF MENA newsletter! Every Thursday, Maria Najjar in Dubai will bring all the fintech news from across one of the most innovative markets in the world, the Middle East. You can see her first issue below.

🍻 And last but certainly not least, we added our new Official Side Events page to the Stablecon website:

Official Side Events — Stablecon

Stablecon

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

(👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know. Find me at @nikmilanovic, @twifintech, and @ndm)

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🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

HSBC launched a new loan product to assist U.S. companies in covering the costs of President Trump's tariffs.

📰 Other News

The US Senate voted to halt a stablecoin bill as tensions rose over President Trump's cryptocurrency involvement and projects. President Trump actively intervened to shape the cryptocurrency legislation, directly contacting lawmakers about the stablecoin bill.

Meanwhile, the OCC ruled that banks could buy and sell cryptocurrency assets for customers, clarifying regulatory guidelines for financial institutions. The CFPB plans to revisit open banking regulations despite facing workforce reductions under the new administration.

Carlyle Group and State Street are exploring a partnership to access the retail wealth management market, seeking to expand their client base beyond institutional investors.

SMBC teamed up with private lenders to offer $1.7 billion in credit facilities, expanding its alternative financing options.

JP Morgan's Kinexys platform is prospering in the Middle East, successfully growing its payment services in the region. The bank meanwhile shut down its Capital Connect platform that matched founders with investors after determining it wasn't financially viable.

💬 Quote of the Week

The @stripe product keynote just finished!

We announced a lot of new stuff. (We actually couldn't fit everything into the keynote.) Some highlights:

• We've built and deployed the first general-purpose Payments Foundation Model. Trained on tens of billions of transactions and…
— Patrick Collison (@patrickc) May 7, 2025

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

There were many, many launches at Stripe Sessions this week (summarized by Patrick Collison above), but a few of my favorites were Stablecoin Financial Accounts – hold a stablecoin balance. Send and receive funds with fiat and crypto rails, a borderless stablecoin-backed card with Ramp, Stripe Orchestration to route payments to multiple processors and monitor performance from your dashboard, and Bridge's programmable USDB stablecoin, which offers rewards on balances.

PlanScope360 partnered with Vestwell to launch financial wellness benefits specifically designed for educators, enhancing retirement planning options for the education sector.

Coinbase introduced X402, a new developer platform product aimed at expanding blockchain integration capabilities for financial applications.

Extend launched an open-source AI toolkit designed to streamline and enhance finance workflows, making sophisticated financial processes more accessible through automation.

Google Wallet brought ID passes to the UK, allowing British users to store digital identification documents on their mobile devices.

N26 followed Revolut in disrupting the telecommunications market, expanding beyond traditional banking services to offer mobile phone plans and related services.

Acquired.com launched a solution for variable recurring payments adoption, creating new infrastructure to facilitate flexible payment schedules for businesses and consumers.

Knot launched its first agentic commerce tool: "AgenticShopping is our new API that lets AI agents—and any developer—programatically buy on behalf of users. Shipping info, saved card, checkout flow."

PayPal launched a contactless mobile wallet in Germany, expanding its digital payment offerings in the European market.

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🍻 Upcoming Events

Join LendingClub’s Lukasz Strozek and Pontus Labs’ Sumant Shringari for a fireside chat on what it actually takes to drive real innovation in financial services.

As automation and AI reshape the industry, they’ll dig into how to move fast without losing focus, why many efficiency initiatives stall out as vaporware, and how to build cultures where technologists drive real, measurable impact.

💼 Job of the Week

📰 Other News

Bhutan turned to Binance Pay to develop a national cryptocurrency payment system specifically for tourism, aiming to modernize financial infrastructure for international visitors.

Meta is exploring stablecoin initiatives, including potential collaborations with Circle's USDC, reviving elements of its previous Diem/Libra digital currency project.

The Solana Policy Institute, Orca, and SuperState proposed an SEC-backed framework to bring Wall Street stocks to the blockchain, seeking regulatory approval for tokenized securities.

Affirm pitched an AI-powered promotions platform to merchant partners, using artificial intelligence to optimize and personalize consumer financing offers.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Revolut will roll out bitcoin lightning payments in Europe through its new partnership with Lightspark.

👎 The Bad News

"Spies Are Everywhere in Cutthroat Fintech Industry"

🎤 More quotes from Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas

"The acquisition of Deribit is a massive unlock for our business and we believe it will establish Coinbase as a premier platform for global derivatives. Deribit has strong historical roots in options trading. So now we bring an options exchange side by side with our spot exchange, our listed futures exchange, our perpetual futures exchange. And we've created now a platform for traders to trade all of these products under one roof. So we think will be the most comprehensive global platform for crypto derivatives. And this is what we're really excited about. It also helps diversify our revenues because it will bring options revenues."

[...]

"Bringing markets together, where we create liquid trading pools that can benefit both retail and institutions and market participants, is really what we do best. We have market infrastructure, we have exchanges, we have markets and then we have front-end engines which we allow everybody to have access to a wider and growing list of asset classes. The institutional market is important though, because it brings more capital into the space, it creates more liquidity, it creates more efficient markets in some ways. And this is what we think creates a more synergistic platform, bringing all these products and services together."

[...]

Nik: "What are you most excited for personally, over the next few years for Coinbase?"

Alesia: "I'm excited for the tailwinds. Now that we've cleared the clouds of regulatory uncertainty, we can build products with confidence. We can have innovation. We're going to see growth of the types of assets we can trade. We're going to add more assets in more customers in more countries, as well as see the advancement of utility through stablecoins, through payments, and – perhaps over the next decade or maybe more near-term – the emergence of crypto social. So lots to come in this space, but we are blocking and tackling. Our heads are down as we continue to innovate and drive products and services that delight our customers."

The Front Page of Fintech

The Front Page of Fintech

Stripe and Coinbase show us how the future of commerce could look (TWIF 5/9)

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The Front Page of Fintech

The Front Page of Fintech

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