Why PayPal Will Probably Say No to Stripe's $53B — and What a Payments Mega-Merger Would Mean for Crypto

The offer that probably gets a polite no

Stripe, the privately held payments giant valued at $159 billion earlier this year, teamed up with private equity firm Advent to bid $53 billion — $60.50 a share — for PayPal. The news, reported by Reuters, sent PayPal stock up 17% to $55.50 in a single day.

Here's the catch: a 17% pop still leaves the stock below the offer price, which usually tells you the market doesn't fully believe the deal closes at that number. And it's easy to see why. PayPal traded around $73 just a year ago. Offering $60.50 to a company that was worth about 20% more a year ago isn't much of a premium — it's opportunism dressed up as one. Analysts at William Blair flat-out called it a likely 'low-ball' offer and floated $70 a share as a more serious starting point.

So what does this mean if you own PayPal? Don't treat $60.50 as a floor, and don't treat it as a done deal. It's an opening bid in a negotiation that either gets sweetened or walks away. That gap between the $55.50 stock price and the offer is the market pricing in exactly that uncertainty.

Offering $60.50 to a company that was worth about 20% more a year ago isn't much of a premium — it's opportunism dressed up as one.

Why a wounded PayPal can still afford to wait

Make no mistake, PayPal is hurting. Shares are down 80% from their 2021 peak of over $305, when pandemic lockdowns pushed tens of millions of people online. Branded checkout growth — sales through PayPal's own button, not services it runs behind the scenes — crawled to 2% and then 1% in recent quarters, and first-quarter profit of $1.1 billion was down 14% from a year earlier. Rivals like Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna and Shopify's Shop Pay have been eating its lunch at the online checkout.

But 'struggling' and 'desperate' aren't the same thing. New CEO Enrique Lores, the former HP boss, only took over in March and is mid-turnaround: cutting $1.5 billion in costs over three years, laying off 4,700 people (20% of staff), and reorganizing into three units, one of which is explicitly 'Payment Services & Crypto.' A CEO who just started swinging the axe to fix the company isn't likely to sell it at the bottom. That's why William Blair doesn't think Lores bites at $60.50.

The takeaway: PayPal's leverage isn't its current numbers — it's that it still owns something Stripe can't easily build, a base of 439 million consumer accounts. Stripe's customers are mostly merchants. Buying PayPal means owning both the shopper and the store. That scarcity is exactly why PayPal can play hard to get.

The real race: moving money onto blockchain rails

Zoom out and this may not be only about checkout market share — it could be about who controls the plumbing if payments migrate onto blockchains. Polygon Labs put it bluntly: 'Within the next few years the majority of money will live and move on blockchain in one form or another.' That's a bold prediction from a company with a horse in the race, but the direction is worth watching: stablecoins (crypto tokens pegged to the dollar) and blockchain rails could eventually cut into the card networks that take a slice of every swipe.

That's why the 'Payment Services & Crypto' unit tucked into PayPal's reorg is worth noticing. It signals PayPal is at least positioning for a world where moving a dollar doesn't have to route through a traditional card network. Pair that with Stripe's merchant reach and PayPal's 439 million consumers, and a combined company would be built to own both ends of a payment — and to experiment with where those payments actually run.

What to watch next: whether Stripe and Advent come back with a number closer to $70, and how hard either company leans into stablecoins in the coming quarters. If a deal happens, the interesting question isn't just 'who won checkout in 2026' — it's who's positioned if the rails themselves start to change underneath everyone.