Stripe Bid $53B for PayPal: Who Actually Wins Stablecoin Payments?

**Ram Ahluwalia** (0:00)
There's a cloud business directly indexed to OpenAI. It's called Oracle. Oracle's got a big contract backlog where they face off with OpenAI, and their stock price dropped 4% today. It's plumbing new lows as we speak, down 50% in the year. So it's not going to lower demand for semiconductors. We still need semiconductors, but it is creating credit risk if you face off with OpenAI, who signed up a trillion dollars in these revenue obligations.
That's why Oracle is feeling the pain here. There was a bit of an own goal here. The founder of that company is a Carnegie Mellon University graduate. So we lost this amazing talent to a geopolitical competitor, which is unfortunate.

**Austin Campbell** (0:46)
Hey everyone, welcome to Bits and Bips, where we explore how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time.
We're here to discuss the latest stories in the worlds of crypto and macro, and as a quick market snapshot of the day. Bitcoin's around 65k as I'm reading this, ETH around 1890, Sol around 77.5, Hype is back to 62, WTI is at 83, Brent's at 89, SpaceX at 120, Circle at 65.5. However, before we begin, a quick commercial break.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:26)
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**Austin Campbell** (2:27)
All right, everybody, welcome back. As always, I'm your host, Austin Campbell, High Scholar of Zero Knowledge Group. I'm here with my usual two co-hosts, Ram Ahluwalia, Maester of Wealth, Leader of Lumida, and Chris Perkins, the Golden Hand of Franklin Crypto. But today, we have a very special guest for our opening segment, Alex Wilson, founder of Cyclops, previously head of Crypto at Payments, Giant Shift4, co-founder of The Giving Block.
And before we begin, a quick reminder that Bits and Bips has its own channels now, separate from Unchained. If you're not subscribed here, you're gonna stop seeing these episodes. So if you hate us, stay off. But otherwise, don't lose your regular dose of the sharpest takes in crypto so you can subscribe on X, YouTube, Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're watching. So every show keeps showing up in your feed. Now today, we're gonna talk about stable coins first, but Alex, as somebody who's been an operator in this space and a guest on the show, could you give us a little background as to what you've done and orient our listeners as to why you're here?

**Alex Wilson** (3:39)
Yeah. Thanks for having me on guys. And yeah, I mean, Austin, your intro was a good starting point. So this is actually my second stab at things, starting Cyclops.
Back in 2018, started The Giving Block, where we helped charities accept crypto and stablecoin donations. And you can imagine in 2018, telling charities to pay attention to crypto wasn't that easy. But we stuck with it and we ended up working with, you know, most of the biggest charities and really dominant 80, 90 percent market share. That business really took off and we sold it to Shift4 about four years ago.
When Shift4 acquired us, that was really their first foray into crypto and stablecoins. And I became the head of crypto and stablecoins there. We stuck around for four years, which is actually, I think, longer than we probably would have expected to because we really were learning a lot and really enjoyed it there. And so we built these different products for stablecoin settlement, for pains and payouts, for the hundreds of thousands of merchants at Shift4. And then just about a year ago, we started Cyclops because we were pretty unhappy with all the solutions in the market. And we really wanted to build a company that was purpose built for the payment space. So that's a quick overview.

**Austin Campbell** (4:51)
Awesome. Thank you. So then let's start with some news in stablecoin's payment space. And let's just lead with the big one. So Stripe and Advent have launched a bid for PayPal where essentially they valued PayPal at about 53 billion. I think that's about a 28 percent premium over the close at the time, so PayPal has traded up from there. And this is Stripe's second run at PayPal. Really the first serious one here.