Weekly Recap: The Week Wall Street Bought In

This week the incumbents stopped experimenting with stablecoins and started buying the whole stack. Stripe bid $53 billion for PayPal, a deal that would put Bridge and PYUSD under one owner, while Visa launched a stablecoin platform on Open USD aimed at 200 million merchants.

The plumbing went live, too: the DTCC began real tokenized-securities trades and OKX pooled tokenized stocks into one book — as Washington pushed the Clarity Act toward a floor vote.

Enjoy!

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Stripe Bids $53B for PayPal, Combining Bridge and PYUSD

Stripe, with Advent International, made an unsolicited ~$53 billion bid for PayPal. If accepted, it would fold Stripe's Bridge stablecoin rails and PayPal's PYUSD token into one company — a vertically integrated stablecoin powerhouse and the clearest sign yet that payments giants treat stablecoins as core infrastructure.

Visa Launches a Stablecoin Platform Built on Open USD

Visa launched an enterprise stablecoin platform that crypto head Cuy Sheffield says will reach more than 200 million merchants, initially through Open USD, the consortium stablecoin positioned against Circle's USDC. Merchant distribution is the moat issuers cannot buy, and Visa just wired it to a USDC rival first.

DTCC Starts Live Tokenized-Securities Trades

The DTCC, the plumbing that settles most US securities trades, began live production trades of tokenized real-world assets with more than two dozen firms, a full launch set for October. When the settlement layer for US markets runs tokenized trades in production, tokenization stops being a pilot story.

Washington Pushes the Clarity Act Toward a Vote

President Trump urged the Senate to pass the Clarity Act, the crypto market-structure bill, in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. Days later, Sen. Cynthia Lummis said bill text would land within days — the closest the SEC-versus-CFTC turf question has come to a floor vote.

Builder-Deployed Markets Overtake Crypto on Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid's builder-deployed markets for stocks, commodities, and indices overtook its native crypto volume on several weekday sessions this month. The largest onchain perps venue is growing past crypto, on markets its own users deployed — turning into a general onchain derivatives layer.