As payment giant Stripe continues to move deeper into crypto, Privy CEO and co-founder Henri Stern says the biggest barrier to adoption isn’t regulation or scaling, but the lack of compelling products. Embedded wallets, he argues, can bridge that gap by making digital assets usable inside everyday applications.
In an exclusive interview with The Defiant founder Camila Russo, Stern explained how Privy fits into Stripe’s broader crypto plans, which now include stablecoins, wallet tools, and its own blockchain efforts. Privy is a developer-focused embedded wallet platform, which Stripe acquired back in June.
Privy’s CEO also pushed back on what he sees as crypto’s habit of framing concepts like decentralization, trustlessness, and custody as binary outcomes rather than design trade-offs — an approach he says has often come at the expense of real security and user adoption.
Stripe Integrates Crypto Rails
Stripe processed $1.4 trillion in payments volume in 2024 and has pushed further into crypto in 2025. The company launched Stablecoin Financial Accounts in May, which let users in more than 100 countries send, receive, and hold stablecoins.
In June, Stripe made another strategic move into crypto infrastructure by acquiring Privy. The deal marked Stripe’s commitment to bridging traditional fintech and on-chain rails by bringing self-custodial crypto-native infrastructure into its product suite.
Stripe acquired Privy following the fintech giant’s $1.1 billion acquisition of stablecoin platform Bridge in February 2025, marking the company’s largest purchase to date and a major step in its push into crypto and stablecoin infrastructure.
In September, Stripe and crypto venture firm Paradigm unveiled Tempo, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain built for high-volume payments. Tempo has not launched on mainnet yet, but it is expected to include a built-in stablecoin trading system.
Stern said these efforts reflect a broader shift inside Stripe, where crypto is no longer confined to a single team but increasingly embedded across product, legal, and engineering groups evaluating how on-chain rails could serve global users.
Privy’s Role in Stripe
Inside Stripe, Privy has taken on a dual role, powering core wallet infrastructure and serving as an internal expertise hub on digital assets, helping coordinate crypto efforts across legal, engineering, and product teams.
Stern said Privy is “the backbone of that stablecoin stack,” helping Stripe power new crypto features for its users. Privy also supports Stripe’s broader work with crypto companies, including access to decentralized finance (DeFi) and building what he described as the “core control plane for digital assets.”
That positioning reflects Privy’s origin as developer infrastructure rather than a consumer wallet, a distinction Stern says is critical to making crypto usable at scale without forcing users to manage private keys, browser extensions, or recovery phrases on day one.
Stern on Tempo
Stern framed Tempo as an example of why specialization matters as crypto infrastructure matures. Rather than viewing new blockchains as unnecessary fragmentation, he argued that payments-focused chains can succeed by optimizing for a specific set of constraints, like high throughput, predictable fees, and developer-friendly abstractions, in the case of Tempo.
Stern argued that while similar functionality could theoretically be built elsewhere, the real question for developers is whether they want to assemble and maintain that stack or rely on purpose-built rails that “just work” for payments at scale. In that sense, Tempo reflects a broader shift toward infrastructure designed around concrete use cases.
Users, Not Ideology
Privy is built to make crypto feel less complicated for users, with Stern describing the company as an “embedded wallet software solution” that lets developers “spin up and host self-hosted wallets as part of their applications.”
This comes as most users still have to download a separate wallet app or browser extension, save a recovery phrase, and buy tokens to pay for gas before they can use many blockchain products.
Stern said this friction has held back otherwise promising crypto products, arguing that many teams have prioritized architectural purity over meeting users where they are.
Privy, he explained, starts with security, then balances usability with user control. “We’re trying to set a floor for security,” Stern told The Defiant. “And then from there we’re optimizing for UX and self custody.”
Rather than treating custody or decentralization as absolutes, Stern described them as design choices that exist along a spectrum, one that developers must navigate based on their users’ needs, threat models, and regulatory constraints.
He added that Privy wallets can support different use cases, including user wallets, developer-controlled wallets, and treasury use cases for companies. The goal is to keep giving developers more flexibility while keeping assets “under the user’s control with the user’s consent,” Stern said.
Looking ahead, Stern said he expects wallets to increasingly function as global financial accounts — interoperating with both traditional banking systems and on-chain applications — as more fintechs experiment with stablecoins, programmable money, and crypto-native settlement layers.
