Announcing Bridge

We’re thrilled to announce that Bridge, a global leader in cross-border stablecoin payments, has chosen Dfns to power its wallet infrastructure. Since May 2024, Bridge has been running in production on Dfns, nearly two years of continuous operation supporting high-volume, real-world payment flows. In a market where reliability, compliance, and speed are non-negotiable, this partnership reflects a shared commitment to building payment infrastructure that actually works at scale.

As demand for stablecoin payments accelerates, Bridge is focused on delivering fast, cost-efficient, and globally accessible transactions. Dfns provides the underlying wallet and signing infrastructure that makes this possible, ensuring every transaction is executed securely, reliably, and in full alignment with enterprise requirements.

Bridge, from startup to Stripe’s stablecoin infrastructure layer

The global payments stack is being rewritten. Stablecoins have emerged as one of the most practical applications of blockchain technology. They combine the stability of fiat currencies with the speed, programmability, and global reach of blockchain networks.

In 2024 alone, stablecoins moved over $15 trillion in value (on par with major card networks).
What started as an alternative rail is now becoming core infrastructure for treasury, remittances, payroll, and B2B payments. Bridge sits at the center of this shift.

In October 2024, Stripe announced the acquisition of Bridge in a deal valued at approximately $1.1 billion, and completed it in early 2025. This was not a talent acquisition or a side bet, it was Stripe’s largest acquisition and a clear signal that stablecoins are becoming a first-class primitive in global payments. Stripe processes close to $2 trillion in annual payment volume, and sees stablecoins as a core driver of future growth. By integrating Bridge, Stripe is effectively embedding stablecoin rails directly into its global financial infrastructure.

Since the acquisition, Bridge has evolved from a fast-growing startup into Stripe’s dedicated stablecoin infrastructure layer. It is now positioned to serve fintechs, enterprises, and financial institutions with a fully integrated stack for moving digital dollars globally, combining crypto-native rails with Stripe’s distribution, compliance, and scale. 

This is further reinforced by regulatory progress. In 2026, Bridge received “conditional approval” for a U.S. national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a major step toward operating stablecoin infrastructure within a formal banking framework.

Bridge’s product stack, powered by Dfns

Bridge provides a full suite of APIs that abstract the complexity of stablecoin payments. Across all of these products, Dfns acts as the execution layer, handling wallets, signing, transaction lifecycle, and blockchain connectivity.

• Orchestration: Bridge’s orchestration layer allows businesses to route payments across multiple rails (blockchains, fiat systems, and liquidity providers) through a single API. It handles FX, routing, settlement, and reconciliation. Underneath, Dfns ensures that every onchain leg of these flows is executed deterministically, with strict control over nonce management, transaction ordering, and confirmation tracking.
• Issuance: Bridge enables businesses to issue and redeem stablecoins, effectively acting as a programmable money layer. Dfns secures the underlying minting, burning, and treasury operations, ensuring that key material is protected and that issuance flows are governed by programmable policies.
• Cards: Bridge integrates stablecoins into card networks, enabling users to spend digital dollars through traditional payment rails while settling in stablecoins. Dfns powers the wallet layer behind these experiences, managing balances, authorizations, and transaction execution across both on-chain and off-chain environments.
• Cross-border payments: Bridge’s core product enables real-time global payments using stablecoins, bypassing correspondent banking and reducing settlement times from days to minutes. Dfns ensures that every payment reaches finality on-chain with high reliability, even under adverse network conditions.

Dfns, the execution layer behind real-world payment flows

Bridge abstracts payments and Dfns ensures that every transaction is securely executed and reliably delivered onchain. Since May 2024, Dfns has been powering Bridge’s wallet infrastructure in production. Over this period, the system has consistently delivered near-zero failure rates across high-volume payment flows, something that is extremely difficult to achieve on blockchain networks.

This is the direct result of several years of work on transaction reliability, detailed in our articles on transaction lifecycle management. Blockchain transactions are not deterministic. They can fail silently, be dropped, replaced, or stuck due to nonce conflicts, gas mispricing, or RPC inconsistencies. At scale, these are not edge cases, they are the main source of failure. 

Dfns addresses this by introducing a deterministic execution layer:

• Multi-node broadcasting with active redundancy
• Automatic retries and rebroadcasting
• Continuous reindexing of blockchain state
• Strict API idempotency
• End-to-end tracking from initiation to finality

Bridge directly benefits from this architecture. Every payment processed through its APIs depends on these guarantees to avoid failed transfers, reconciliation issues, and operational overhead. On top of this, Dfns has built a higher-level transaction orchestration system. This system gives Bridge full control over transaction lifecycle management:

• Deterministic nonce management
• Transaction queuing and prioritization
• Failure handling and fallback strategies
• Precise control over ordering and execution

At Bridge’s scale, payments are not individual transactions, they are continuous billion-dollar flows. This level of control is what allows the platform to operate reliably under load.

Infrastructure for payments at institutional scale

Dfns supports over 60 blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Polygon, Tron, and Solana, covering the primary rails for stablecoin liquidity. 

Security is enforced at every layer through MPC, HSM, and secure enclave architectures, ensuring that private keys are never exposed while maintaining high availability and performance. In parallel, Dfns enforces an intent-based transaction model, where every operation is validated against programmable policies before signing. This allows Bridge to implement enterprise-grade controls over approvals, limits, and compliance.

The result is infrastructure that combines high throughput, deterministic execution, strong security guarantees, and full auditability. And the combination of Bridge and Dfns represents a new type of financial infrastructure. Bridge provides the abstraction layer, handling FX, routing, issuance, and user-facing payment flows, and Dfns provides the execution layer, ensuring that every transaction is signed, broadcast, and settled correctly onchain.

Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge made one thing clear: stablecoins are no longer experimental. They are becoming a core component of global payments infrastructure. After nearly two years of running together in production, this stack is already operating at scale. Not as a proof of concept. But as real infrastructure moves real money globally faster, cheaper, and more reliably than legacy systems ever could.

Start building on Dfns today: app.dfns.io/get-started