Trying to create a monopoly before the lack of antitrust enforcement window closes.
toomuchtodo•Jul 15, 2026
No reason it can’t be broken apart in the future. States will likely file suit, as twelve already have regarding the Paramount Warner deal.
ergocoder•Jul 15, 2026
I doubt Stripe is anywhere near the monopoly status.
nickjj•Jul 15, 2026
Back when selling online tech courses was viable (pre-AI), about 30% of transactions in the US were from folks using PayPal on the platform I used. There's a huge of people who use PayPal, it's even more outside of the US.
dlcarrier•Jul 15, 2026
In the US, PayPal has nowhere near the adoption of other countries, for making payments directly between accounts, and Visa and Mastercard have enough regulatory capture to ensure it stays that way.
If there wasn't a regulation-ensured duopoly, everyone would be switching to RTP or FedNow which each charge 4.5¢ per transaction, without an additional commission.
digitaltrees•Jul 15, 2026
What is the regulatory capture? Visa and master card have contract terms that ensure retail capture. That’s a private moat not regulation.
charlieyu1•Jul 15, 2026
What’s stopping a new competitor to come in apart from regulations? You would expect someone already trying that given how profitable it is
digitaltrees•Jul 15, 2026
The contracts with merchants prohibited them from accepting other forms of payment.
That would be quite a play. Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, Xoom all under one umbrella. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for online card-not-present (CNP) checkout on that is going to be absurdly high and this will take a lot of convincing to beat antitrust. They will probably have to unwind Venmo and Braintree.
pstuart•Jul 15, 2026
Gosh, with such efficiency of operations consumers will win because pricing of their services will be more efficient! Todays Feds will try selling that story.
SOLAR_FIELDS•Jul 15, 2026
Convince who? There is no such thing as antitrust anymore in the USA, it’s merely the size of the bribe required to let the merger go through now
bluedevil2k•Jul 15, 2026
States have the ability to sue to block mergers as well as the federal government. See the recent 11 state lawsuit seeking to block the WarnerMount merger.
xp84•Jul 15, 2026
Just a couple of months ago, someone was still suing[1] to block Alaska Air/Hawaiian. This is a merger that already entirely went through. I would predict equal likelihood of some state lawsuit derailing a merger like this.
There's a pretty clear difference between a lawsuit by 8 individuals, vs one filed by attorneys general representing a combined ~100m people.
xp84•Jul 15, 2026
Quite true. Or honestly, it's really barely about direct financial bribery anymore[1] - all the recent ones have just hinged on incredibly naïve (and easily manipulable) readings of how a merger might affect culture war / red vs blue partisanship.
For instance, CNN really doesn't matter, and was a tiny part of WB/Discovery, but of course Trump cares deeply about (hating) CNN, so all that was needed to win over Trump and guarantee his approval was for the acquirer to whisper to him that they'd do a housecleaning there. This lifehack would work for acquiring any company that happens to control any media property that hasn't established itself as a Trump cheerleader.
Note: I'm not even a Democrat today, but the pure and petty corruption on display definitely sickens me.
[1] though, back when it was, the bribes were astoundingly high ROI due to how cheap they were!
dlcarrier•Jul 15, 2026
If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.
At least the others offer the hope that maybe some customers will pay directly from a Stripe/PayPal account, without the high commission and high risk of a Visa/MasterCard network transaction.
chirau•Jul 15, 2026
Not true. Visa and Mastercard don't make the bulk of the commission. When a merchant pays a standard 2.9% + $0.30 fee on a credit card transaction the issuing bank gets roughly 1.5-2.5% for interchange, which is the bulk. The processor or acquirer gets anywhere from 0.2-0.5% and the card network gets only about 0.1-0.15.
Also, PayPal does not lower a vendor's commission. If they pay with a PayPal cash balance, PayPal still charges the merchant a premium flat rate (often 3.49%) and simply pockets the entire spread. They don't pass the savings down. And consumer's don't have a Stripe account to pay from, Stripe is probably aiming for PayPal wallets via this move.
sgerenser•Jul 15, 2026
Upvote because AFAIK this is true. Not sure why your comment was downvoted to dead just a few minutes ago.
ThePowerOfFuet•Jul 15, 2026
>If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.
3DS2 is the solution to that problem.
goofy_lemur•Jul 15, 2026
I mean less competition is probably not good for anyone.
ergocoder•Jul 15, 2026
Except for Stripe and other payment gateway companies, of course
verdverm•Jul 15, 2026
and their oligarch financiers
lobito25•Jul 15, 2026
2 poo companies
mertbio•Jul 15, 2026
Paypal is quite popular in Germany but with Wero that popularity will decrease significantly. I expect that all around the Europe.
solarkraft•Jul 15, 2026
I have not tried Wero, but I have tried the german predecessor (paydirekt/giropay). It was ... not much less smooth than PayPal.
But I’ve only ever seen a single vendor offering it. 0 for Wero so far.
LelouBil•Jul 15, 2026
I don't think vendors can offer Wero yet. I think it's part of the merger with other European companies.
Semaphor•Jul 15, 2026
That is what keeps confusing me when people hype wero. It essentially (I think some limited trials?) doesn't exist for B2C, and sending money to friends is a very minor use case.
So once it has really broad support and can be used as merchant, is when it'll maybe become interesting.
LelouBil•Jul 15, 2026
Well it's a nice thing to be able to send money across european countries only with a phone number even if it's only among consumers for now.
But it's been confirmed they are merging with companies that are already B2C in their own countries to bring a european B2C system
ahoef•Jul 15, 2026
Wero is essentially iDeal. iDeal is great.
r1ch•Jul 15, 2026
Great for merchants, not so much for consumers. Once the merchant has your money it's very difficult to get it back if things go wrong.
juujian•Jul 15, 2026
I don't know if popular is quite the right word. It certainly is widely used though...
janpio•Jul 15, 2026
I like your optimism.
okanat•Jul 15, 2026
Paying with Paypal is as easy as logging in. With Wero/iDeal you always need a phone or a code. People trust PayPal more too.
So... I got banned from PayPal (with no explanation) and Stripe closed my account (with no recourse for 'crowdfunding' after linking to Ko-Fi).
Cool, awesome, that's gonna be a great monopolistic picture for those that get unbanked across the entire Internet.
1970-01-01•Jul 15, 2026
I've been thru 3 or 4 'lifetime' bans with PayPal. Just ask to be reinstated during the next big shakeup (now) and they'll let you back in. They want your money. They want your business. The exact same things you couldn't sell 25 years ago, the things that got you banned, are now listed online without care. They literally forget.
charlieyu1•Jul 15, 2026
PayPal user for 20+ years and it is time to end that dross
nolok•Jul 15, 2026
Nah, I hate them with a passion as a merchant but I absolutely love them as a buyer and customer.
There is a reason why after all these years and other solutions they're still everywhere, and it's not because of their great tooling, their low fees or their awesome support for merchant. It's not because of market lock in either, at least here in Europe they're merely a middle man between my credit card or sepa bank account and the merchant. It's because buyers trust it.
Buyers don't trust stripe. Stripe is for the merchant.
bastawhiz•Jul 15, 2026
As a buyer I don't trust Paypal. They use dark patterns to try to get me to sign in, then make it hard to sign out, and for whatever reason my account is wedged and even though it has the correct payment details, the payments all fail. The UI is antiquated and the embedded version that has the animated progress bar GIF is sketchy at best. The Venmo app (which Paypal owns) is jammed with crappy ads and an often-broken UI.
dqv•Jul 15, 2026
Nah I thought I liked PayPal as a customer until I found out that they favor large merchants against the consumer. I had a problem with a product and the company was playing games with the warranty. I only had it for 3 months and it was already falling apart. I made a complaint with PP and it was auto denied.
I will never use PP for a large purchase again.
KomoD•Jul 15, 2026
I don't trust either one.
And as a consumer, I especially hate PayPal because they always try to screw me with their currency conversion rates by hiding the toggle button (and it happens that I sometimes forget to toggle over to my bank's currency conversion)
And only once have I ever won a payment dispute there (and that was as a merchant, not a buyer... lol)
ceejayoz•Jul 15, 2026
Yeah, any subscription I can push through PayPal, I do so, because I can cancel it directly on their end. I don't need to go through a ten click justification process with the merchant.
quantummagic•Jul 15, 2026
> ... because buyers trust it.
I did until October 2022, when PayPal published an update to its Acceptable Use Policy that threatened to fine users $2,500 for promoting "misinformation".
Like they were the arbiters of what is misinformation and worthy of economic penalty. While it was later rescinded, it was beyond the pale. It's proof that something is corrupt and completely out to lunch in their management, and I won't sign up again after deleting my account in protest.
BoingBoomTschak•Jul 15, 2026
Sadly still chained to it for Discogs...
ck2•Jul 15, 2026
I really do not grasp business when PayPal is somehow worth over $50 Billion
It doesn't have assets? It's not a bank
Is it because PayPal is integrated already into so many websites?
Wouldn't it take decades to make back $50 Billion in fees?
rwaksmunski•Jul 15, 2026
It's a bank in Europe
jc_811•Jul 15, 2026
If you look at their financials, they’re clearly making money. In 2025 they had 33B in revenue with a net income of 5.2B
hyperbovine•Jul 15, 2026
PayPal is sort of the Facebook of digital payments: they stopped being directly relevant years ago, but own many of the things that you or someone you know continue to use. Venmo being the obvious one, but also Braintree, Xoom, Honey, Bill Me Later, etc.
wyre•Jul 15, 2026
According to Wikipedia they hold $80 billion in assets.
They also hold a lot of financial data of its users, which is certainly worth more than anything that could ever make sense to my pleb brain.
tmtvl•Jul 15, 2026
Doesn't PayPal confiscate your money if you forget to withdraw it in time?
coredev_•Jul 15, 2026
Why, what is the play here? I know PayPal is used extensively in some countries (like Brazil?) but in most countries there are other/local services that have substantial market share and I do not think that PayPal can compete.
rglover•Jul 15, 2026
Consolidation (move toward making Stripe the only game in town).
nozzlegear•Jul 15, 2026
If I'm buying something from a website and they don't offer Apple Pay, I'll opt for PayPal instead since I already have my credit/debit cards saved there and don't want to hand over numbers to a random website. Also, when I used to do more freelancing, all of my clients preferred to be invoiced and pay through PayPal (who skimmed a decent chunk of change off the top).
Not sure if either of those reasons would be what Stripe wants here, but just my two cents. I'm American fwiw.
xp84•Jul 15, 2026
Don't forget Venmo - PayPal smartly gobbled that up many, many years ago, and it has a great amount of mindshare (though I don't know how profitable it is). Zelle popped up later and somehow has plenty of users, but unlike Venmo, Zelle is a steaming pile of sh*t of user experience, due to it being a consortium of all the famously-tech-backwards big banks, which stood it up out of fear and jealousy that those "Internet" guys might find a way to disintermediate them somehow.
onlypassingthru•Jul 15, 2026
Zelle was built to preempt FedNow. The banks saw what was coming and wanted to own instant payments.
> Zelle popped up later and somehow has plenty of users,
At least for me, Zelle is something I can do in my bank app, so I don't need to work with anything I wasn't already using.
It feels a lot easier to use than Venmo, but I dunno. It's one of like 7 options I have to transfer in the bank app.
muvlon•Jul 15, 2026
Interesting that you'd mention Brazil. I consider it one of the very few examples of countries successfully replacing PayPal with a publicly owned service. Pix is ubiquitous in Brazil and has been for years. It has not only displaced PayPal but also cash and (in large parts) Visa/MasterCard, even in the face of US tariff threats.
usrnm•Jul 15, 2026
It's actually pretty common for local payment systems to exist, it's not just Brazil. I've seen such systems in Europe, Asia, Africa and I'm sure they exist in other places I've never been to
muvlon•Jul 15, 2026
Oh they exist all over the place. Pix is just unique in its success. It has only been around for ~5 years and it's completely taken over the country.
zuzululu•Jul 15, 2026
thrilled that stripe is buying paypal
thunderfork•Jul 15, 2026
Everyone rushing to get these consolidations done before America starts having anti-trust law again, huh?
Topology1•Jul 15, 2026
Do the processing fees really add up? Can't fathom that Stripe is big enough to buy PayPal, but maybe I'm just 10 years behind on this industry.
nailer•Jul 15, 2026
Yes. People are prepared to pay Stripe 1% of all their revenue, same way they're prepared to pay card companies 2%.
erelong•Jul 15, 2026
AI "sez": "PayPal's valuation has declined significantly from its peak of approximately $360 billion in 2021"
haven't been following the drop because otherwise I thought that Paypal was more valuable than Stipe + Advent combined (which seems to have previously been the case) - and so I would have thought Paypal would have been buying the other companies and that this was some weird way to try to devalue a competitor by offering to buy them
nickjj•Jul 15, 2026
I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more?
I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was impossible. Their tax division specialists also replied by email with big bold red letters outlining how it's not possible and that I'm wrong multiple times. They were contacted through support cases I opened with other reps on the phone since they aren't directly accessible on phone.
Then I said I was canceling my account with them if this wasn't resolved since it would have resulted in me needing to pay $400 to have my taxes amended. Long story short, after being ghosted for 3 months they replied to me saying I was right and they indeed had the impossible problem, then fixed their tax forms a week before taxes were due.
It's really bad that a random person on the internet discovered a huge issue with one of their partners and their instinct was to require ~10 hours of back and forth phone calls, multiple emails, me giving them the likely problem and solution on day 1 only to be lead on and ignored for months until the very last second.
dfunckt•Jul 15, 2026
The dystopia that PayPal is we’re cheering and paying trillionaires to bring forward faster. Can’t wait.
elevation•Jul 15, 2026
I typically use paypal for paying contractors, but try to "load balance" across a couple competitors because you never know when one of them will flag your account, nor for how long it will be flagged.
Consolidation in this industry puts my ability to transmit money at greater risk.
motoxpro•Jul 15, 2026
This would be amazing! Its such a pain having to set up two payment solutions as a merchant and as a buyer it would be great if I could use my paypal credit on whatever purchase I want. Consumers want paypal and merchant want stripe. I really want this to happen.
taylorbuley•Jul 15, 2026
My worry is that fees might go through the roof without any other options
18 Comments
If there wasn't a regulation-ensured duopoly, everyone would be switching to RTP or FedNow which each charge 4.5¢ per transaction, without an additional commission.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
[1] https://viewfromthewing.com/passengers-demand-court-undo-ala...
For instance, CNN really doesn't matter, and was a tiny part of WB/Discovery, but of course Trump cares deeply about (hating) CNN, so all that was needed to win over Trump and guarantee his approval was for the acquirer to whisper to him that they'd do a housecleaning there. This lifehack would work for acquiring any company that happens to control any media property that hasn't established itself as a Trump cheerleader.
Note: I'm not even a Democrat today, but the pure and petty corruption on display definitely sickens me.
[1] though, back when it was, the bribes were astoundingly high ROI due to how cheap they were!
At least the others offer the hope that maybe some customers will pay directly from a Stripe/PayPal account, without the high commission and high risk of a Visa/MasterCard network transaction.
Also, PayPal does not lower a vendor's commission. If they pay with a PayPal cash balance, PayPal still charges the merchant a premium flat rate (often 3.49%) and simply pockets the entire spread. They don't pass the savings down. And consumer's don't have a Stripe account to pay from, Stripe is probably aiming for PayPal wallets via this move.
3DS2 is the solution to that problem.
But I’ve only ever seen a single vendor offering it. 0 for Wero so far.
So once it has really broad support and can be used as merchant, is when it'll maybe become interesting.
But it's been confirmed they are merging with companies that are already B2C in their own countries to bring a european B2C system
But we aren't there yet.
Cool, awesome, that's gonna be a great monopolistic picture for those that get unbanked across the entire Internet.
There is a reason why after all these years and other solutions they're still everywhere, and it's not because of their great tooling, their low fees or their awesome support for merchant. It's not because of market lock in either, at least here in Europe they're merely a middle man between my credit card or sepa bank account and the merchant. It's because buyers trust it.
Buyers don't trust stripe. Stripe is for the merchant.
I will never use PP for a large purchase again.
And as a consumer, I especially hate PayPal because they always try to screw me with their currency conversion rates by hiding the toggle button (and it happens that I sometimes forget to toggle over to my bank's currency conversion)
And only once have I ever won a payment dispute there (and that was as a merchant, not a buyer... lol)
I did until October 2022, when PayPal published an update to its Acceptable Use Policy that threatened to fine users $2,500 for promoting "misinformation".
Like they were the arbiters of what is misinformation and worthy of economic penalty. While it was later rescinded, it was beyond the pale. It's proof that something is corrupt and completely out to lunch in their management, and I won't sign up again after deleting my account in protest.
It doesn't have assets? It's not a bank
Is it because PayPal is integrated already into so many websites?
Wouldn't it take decades to make back $50 Billion in fees?
They also hold a lot of financial data of its users, which is certainly worth more than anything that could ever make sense to my pleb brain.
Not sure if either of those reasons would be what Stripe wants here, but just my two cents. I'm American fwiw.
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
At least for me, Zelle is something I can do in my bank app, so I don't need to work with anything I wasn't already using.
It feels a lot easier to use than Venmo, but I dunno. It's one of like 7 options I have to transfer in the bank app.
haven't been following the drop because otherwise I thought that Paypal was more valuable than Stipe + Advent combined (which seems to have previously been the case) - and so I would have thought Paypal would have been buying the other companies and that this was some weird way to try to devalue a competitor by offering to buy them
I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was impossible. Their tax division specialists also replied by email with big bold red letters outlining how it's not possible and that I'm wrong multiple times. They were contacted through support cases I opened with other reps on the phone since they aren't directly accessible on phone.
Then I said I was canceling my account with them if this wasn't resolved since it would have resulted in me needing to pay $400 to have my taxes amended. Long story short, after being ghosted for 3 months they replied to me saying I was right and they indeed had the impossible problem, then fixed their tax forms a week before taxes were due.
It's really bad that a random person on the internet discovered a huge issue with one of their partners and their instinct was to require ~10 hours of back and forth phone calls, multiple emails, me giving them the likely problem and solution on day 1 only to be lead on and ignored for months until the very last second.
Consolidation in this industry puts my ability to transmit money at greater risk.