From the February trial to the $53 billion hunt, PayPal (PYPL.US) refused to be Stripe's “discount prey”! The battle for “full-stack hegemony” of digital payments heats up

The Zhitong Finance App learned that some media quoted information revealed by people familiar with the matter as reporting that the board of directors of PayPal (PYPL.US), one of the world's largest digital payment service providers, believes that the $53 billion acquisition offer proposed by Stripe, a major fintech infrastructure platform for enterprises and developers, and that the company's overall value is underestimated by the company's overall value, and that it will face global antitrust regulations and financing barriers in the future. This latest statement by the board of directors may pave the way for large-scale takeover price increases surrounding the future fate of the American digital payments supergiant over the years.

PayPal spokespersons and representatives have yet to provide an official response to the proposal. According to media reports, PayPal's board of directors is weighing this offer — and the possibility of other offers, against management's business reversal strategy.

In February of this year, Stripe revealed preliminary research to acquire all or part of PayPal's assets; in April, they also came into contact with PayPal together with ADVENT and Block, then Block withdrew. Stripe and Advent officially submitted a joint offer of 60.50 US dollars per share and a total value of more than 53 billion US dollars in July, a share price premium of about 28% compared to before the news was announced. The latest state of affairs is still an offer game rather than a deal: PayPal has yet to officially respond. The board of directors initially believes that the offer underestimates its potential value after a successful transformation, while questioning the certainty of financing, antitrust risk, and the long transaction delivery cycle.

The bidder, on the other hand, has received financing support of about 50 billion US dollars from J.P. Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, and invested 17 billion US dollars in equity capital. Stripe-Advent is currently the most serious buyer, but PayPal is still waiting for potential bidders. According to reports, many bidding agencies regard the July 28 PayPal financial report as the most critical recent point to test whether the brand's checkout business can be stabilized and then decide to negotiate chips.

The media quoted people familiar with the matter as reporting that the initial opinion of the PayPal board of directors is that although the price of $60.50 per share is a premium over the company's recent stock price, if management successfully implements its large-scale business transformation strategy in the next few years, the offer does not fully reflect the potential value the company may create. At a time when US technology stocks are generally falling into a sharp pullback, PayPal's stock price rose 2% to $56.73 as of Thursday's close.

People familiar with the matter added that PayPal's board of directors is also weighing many factors other than price, including funding certainty, potential antitrust regulatory barriers, and the long merger and acquisition cycle that may be required to complete any transaction. The person familiar with the matter said that the board of directors plans to hold more meetings to conduct multiple rounds of discussions.

When the Stripe-Advent consortium proposed the acquisition offer, American digital payment and digital wallet operator PayPal, which was founded in the late 1990s, has been struggling in recent years to compete with strong digital payment competitors such as Apple Pay by Apple and Google Pay founded by Google. Against the backdrop of continued slowing performance growth, management is striving to take transformational measures to boost the continuing slump in stock prices.

What are the differences in the value chain levels of the four major digital payment giants?

Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay can all be classified as digital payment giants in a broad sense, but the specific value chain levels they are in are not the same. Stripe is essentially a financial infrastructure platform for enterprises and developers: it provides payment acceptance, merchant billing, platform billing, card issuance, fund transfer, and AI anti-fraud capabilities through APIs. Its core customers are merchants, software platforms, and Internet companies. Its competitiveness comes from technology integration efficiency, payment success rate, and cross-border compliance capabilities, rather than huge consumer wallet accounts.

PayPal, one of Stripe's largest competitors, is a hybrid platform of “consumer account network+merchant payment processing”: it not only has consumer wallets such as PayPal and Venmo, brand checkout buttons, and peer-to-peer transfer relationships, but also processes bank cards, digital wallets, and local payment methods for large merchants through Braintree, so it also controls some consumer identity entrances and merchant back-office, and the degree of overlap with Stripe's business is much higher than Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Apple Pay and Google Pay are essentially closer to digital wallets and authentication portals at the device and operating system layer, rather than complete payment processors. After the user binds a credit or debit card issued by the bank to the wallet, Apple relies on Secure Element, device tokens, and biometrics to complete security authorization; Google Pay returns the encrypted payment token to the merchant, and then the merchant's backend hands it to Stripe, Adyen, Braintree or the bank billing agency to complete the actual transaction processing and settlement. Similar to Google Pay, after Apple Pay completes the Apple Pay front-end process, it is also necessary to pass the payment token to Payment processors (payment processors), but they don't necessarily have to be handed over to Stripe, Adyen, or Braintree.

In other words, Apple and Google master “who can most conveniently and securely initiate payments,” Stripe controls “how merchants access, route, and manage payments,” and PayPal is trying to simultaneously master “what accounts consumers use to pay” and “how merchants complete settlement.”

$53 billion hunt to create a “super full-stack operating system” for global digital payments

If the essence of the moat of Apple Pay and Google Pay comes mainly from terminal ecosystems and traffic entrances; more of Stripe's real value comes from programmable infrastructure, data, and scale effects; PayPal's scarcity lies in having both a consumer network and a payment background—this is the core reason why it may become Stripe's strategic acquisition target.

The underlying logic behind Stripe's desire to acquire PayPal is not simply to expand the scale of digital transactions on its platforms, but to connect Stripe's merchant side “operating system” with PayPal's consumer identity, wallet, and trust network in a closed loop. Stripe has API-native payment acceptance, subscription billing, Connect platform payment, risk control, card issuance, and stablecoin infrastructure. The processing scale reached $1.9 trillion in 2025, an increase of 34% over the previous year; PayPal has more than 430 million consumer accounts, Venmo, brand checkout buttons, BNPL, and Braintree corporate payments, with a TPV of $1.79 trillion in 2025.

By combining the two, a unified business-consumer data map can be used to improve payment authorization rates, fraud identification, and intelligent routing efficiency, and leave more “in-system transactions” within the network to reduce some external processing costs and improve individual transaction efficiency. The more forward-looking value lies in AI smart commerce: shopping intelligence not only needs to discover products, but also complete identity authentication, payment authorization, anti-fraud, dispute handling, and after-sales fulfillment; Stripe's programmable infrastructure superimposes PayPal's account credentials, consumer trust, and Agent Ready/Store Sync capabilities, and has the opportunity to become the default settlement layer for AI agents such as OpenClaw to move from “search” to “transaction.”

The merged Stripe-PayPal can also cover merchant APIs, receipt processing, consumer wallets, P2P, checkout, risk control and capital services, and is a “full-stack payment and financial infrastructure platform”; Apple Pay and Google Pay are terminal wallets and identity entrances; Shopify is closer to a commercial operating system integrating stores, orders, inventory, checkout, and payments; Adyen, Fiserv/Payworld, etc. are biased towards professional payment processing and receipt infrastructure. PayPal's Braintree itself already provides end-to-end enterprise payment processing, while Stripe is clearly positioned as a financial infrastructure that can orchestrate multiple processors and third-party systems.

If Stripe merges PayPal, global payments will be relatively separated from each link in the value chain and upgraded to a cross-level competition between full-stack payment platforms and ecosystem controllers at different levels. If the transaction finally comes to fruition, the global payment competition will be upgraded from digital wallets, merchant billing, and payment processing to a multi-layer war between full-stack payment platforms, terminal wallet entrances, merchant business ecology, and professional financial infrastructure. Stripe-PayPal will use merchant APIs, consumer accounts, P2P networks, and checkout capabilities to compete asymmetrically with Apple Pay and Google Pay terminal entrances, Shopify's merchant ecosystem, and processing networks such as Adyen and Fiserv/Worldpay.