Bridge founder Zach Abrams says his stablecoin company was built on a miscalculation. "We were very U.S.-centric," Abrams told Fortune. "Unbeknownst to us, there was all this pent up demand outside the U.S. to build with stablecoins."
The firm's first customers pushed it toward cross-border payment infrastructure between the U.S. and Colombia, and payouts into Venezuela and the Philippines — markets defined by high friction moving money across borders.
Today, dollar-denominated stablecoins make up more than 95% of all stablecoin transactions, according to Abrams. That dominance has unsettled governments outside the U.S. who worry stablecoins could entrench the dollar's grip on global trade and financial flows.
Abrams sees it differently: the dollar's share simply reflects an immature market. "We're in the early stages," he said. "But in a world where more and more of our infrastructure is tokenized, it's going to be incredibly important to have tokenized local currencies."
His pitch is straightforward capital logic. "Businesses in Singapore are going to want to hold tokenized Singapore dollars, so they can convert them into Treasuries or other assets to earn yield," he explained. Bridge does not yet support the Singapore dollar. It currently offers tokenized euros, Mexican pesos and British pounds, with Brazilian real stablecoins coming soon.
Abrams cofounded Bridge in San Francisco in 2021 with Sean Yu, now the company's chief technology officer, betting that stablecoins would become mainstream payment rails because they move money "way cheaper and faster" than legacy systems. SpaceX uses Bridge's technology to repatriate Starlink earnings to the U.S., and the rails are especially favored in rural emerging markets that traditional providers cannot reach.
By 2024, Bridge was processing payment volume at an annualized rate of more than $5 billion after raising $58 million from Sequoia and Haun Ventures. Stripe bought the company that year for $1.1 billion — at the time its largest acquisition, since surpassed by Stripe's reported $7 billion purchase of AI model gateway OpenRouter.
Abrams wants Bridge to do for tokenization what Stripe did for online payments: a single "simplification layer" over a fragmented landscape. Asian financial hubs like Singapore and Hong Kong are rolling out regulatory frameworks for stablecoins, even as China and India remain skeptical of digital currencies broadly. "The region is warming to stablecoins, but it's not as warm as the U.S. yet," Abrams said, adding that looser regulation will unlock more use cases.
He draws a direct line between Latin America and Asia: both regions have growing middle classes, rapid urbanization and heavy reliance on cross-border trade. "Stablecoin adoption is so big in Brazil because so much of their economy involves cross-border business, while the regulatory environment supports a pretty dynamic crypto ecosystem," he said.
The numbers come first, and they tell a simple story: private capital found demand governments never anticipated, and it built the infrastructure to serve it without waiting for permission. Bridge's growth from a Colombia-Venezuela payments fix to a billion-dollar Stripe asset is a case study in what happens when entrepreneurs, not regulators, identify where money actually wants to move.
The lesson for policymakers from Brasília to Singapore is the same one Washington should heed: markets that welcome tokenized capital, rather than fear it, are the ones that will capture the next wave of financial innovation. Capital rewards clear rules — and it is already voting with its volume.
