The biggest acquisition in crypto was announced this week. Bridge, which provides stablecoin issuance and orchestration APIs, was bought by Stripe, a payments processing infrastructure company, for $1.1 billion. The deal is a sorely needed reputation buff for an industry under persistent regulatory attack and plagued by memecoins, pump-and-dumps, and endemic boom and bust cycles.

Together, Bridge and Stripe make up the best of both (onchain and offchain) worlds: while Bridge creates the infrastructure to move between any form of digital dollar, Stripe powers fiat payment processing for millions of businesses. And importantly, a successful Bridge and Stripe partnership means that Stripe could own more B2B payment flows — which banks currently control — via transacting with stablecoins using Bridge’s infrastructure.

To understand why Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge is important, we need to first understand the way the global financial system works. In its current state, there’s an intricate web of intermediaries (banks, payment processors, financial institutions) each taking a cut from when a business moves money from point A to point B. Transacting with stablecoins — or onchain, tokenized dollars — requires far fewer middlemen, and as a result, is much cheaper.