Zach Abrams

When Zach Abrams pitched the stablecoin idea at an internal lunch-and-learn at the embedded-wallet company Privy, the verdict came back that stablecoins for payments were "not a market, it does not exist." That was 2022, the year Terra LUNA collapsed in the spring and FTX collapsed in the fall, and he and his co-founder kept building anyway.¹ Abrams is the co-founder and former CEO of Bridge, a company that built application programming interfaces letting other businesses move money across borders using stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to a currency such as the US dollar. Bridge was acquired by Stripe in 2025 for roughly 1.1 billion dollars, and Abrams later took on an additional role as interim chief executive of Open Standard, a separate company operating a stablecoin called Open USD.

Background

Abrams grew up in the United States and studied economics and history at Duke University, graduating in 2007. He began his career in finance rather than technology: an analyst role in media and technology leveraged finance at Wachovia Securities from 2007 to 2009, followed by two years as an associate at the private equity firm Littlejohn & Co in Greenwich, Connecticut. That finance background is unusual among consumer-fintech founders, who more often come up through engineering.

Getting started

Abrams' path into building companies started in 2011, when he co-founded Evenly, a peer-to-peer payment app aimed at college campus networks, and ran it as CEO until Square acquired it in 2013. He stayed on at Square, helping build and lead its Square Customers unit through 2015. He then spent two years as director of product management at Remind, a messaging platform used widely in American schools, before moving to Coinbase in 2017 to head product for its consumer business, and then to Brex in 2019 as chief product officer.

He and Sean Yu, another Coinbase alumnus, founded Bridge in 2022. Their first idea was not stablecoins: they explored a wallet-as-a-service business and, in Abrams' own description, concluded it was a "tar pit," a deeply competitive space with little room to build a defensible company. The idea that stuck came from Bridge's first developer customer, a company called Zulu based in Colombia, which showed the founders a concrete cross-border opportunity: converting Colombian pesos into the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC and back into dollars, more cheaply and quickly than existing banking channels. That corridor became Bridge's founding thesis.¹

Bridge launched into difficult timing. It was raising money and building through both collapses, which Abrams has described as having "nuked" the crypto industry's credibility twice within a single year. He and Yu kept building on the thesis anyway.¹

What he built

Bridge's product is an orchestration layer: APIs that let developers accept local currencies, convert them into stablecoins, move those stablecoins across blockchains and borders, and convert them back into local currency on the other end. On top of that, Bridge later added an open issuance platform, letting any company mint and manage its own custom stablecoin rather than depend on a third-party issuer such as Tether or Circle.

Customers spanned crypto-native companies (Phantom, MetaMask, Hyperliquid) and traditional businesses, most notably SpaceX, which used Bridge to convert local-currency Starlink subscription revenue collected in dozens of countries back into dollars, and DolarApp, a dollar-denominated neobank for Latin America built on Bridge's stablecoin rails. The company raised about 58 million dollars from investors including Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, reaching a valuation of roughly 200 million dollars at its 40 million dollar Series A in 2024. By the time Stripe agreed to acquire it in October 2024, Bridge had crossed 5 billion dollars in annualized payment volume. Stripe closed the deal in February 2025 at a reported price of about 1.1 billion dollars, its largest acquisition to that point.¹

How he operates

Abrams frames the case for stablecoins in structural rather than technological terms. His recurring description of existing cross-border financial infrastructure is that it is an "N-squared" problem: every pair of countries or currencies has historically required its own custom-built banking and compliance relationship. His argument is that a shared stablecoin standard collapses that to a problem of size N, since any company can plug into one interoperable rail instead of building a new one per corridor. He has summarized this as effectively open-sourcing the financial stack.¹

He built Bridge's open issuance product around a related belief he states as his own conviction: that any company sitting on a large stablecoin balance has an economic incentive to issue its own coin rather than rely on someone else's, in order to capture the yield on those reserves, control which blockchain it runs on, and avoid being dependent on a third party that can change fees or terms unilaterally, a risk he has compared to building a business on top of someone else's social media platform. Abrams and Yu kept building on the stablecoin thesis through two sequential crypto collapses in a single year rather than abandoning it.

Where things stand

Bridge continues to operate as part of Stripe's stablecoin infrastructure push following the 2025 close. On June 30, 2026, Abrams took on the additional role of interim CEO of Open Standard, an independent company operating a new stablecoin called Open USD, launched with more than 140 partner organizations spanning card networks, payment processors, banks, and crypto infrastructure firms.² Open USD's design, in which many companies pool into one shared, neutrally governed stablecoin and split the reserve economics, differs from the open-issuance approach Abrams built Bridge around, which lets companies each issue their own coin. As of mid-2026, Abrams had not publicly addressed how he reconciles the two models.

Key facts

• Co-founded Bridge in 2022 with fellow Coinbase alumnus Sean Yu, after both had worked at Coinbase and, in Abrams' case, Square and Brex.
• Bridge raised about 58 million dollars from Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, reaching a 200 million dollar valuation at its 2024 Series A before crossing 5 billion dollars in annualized payment volume.
• Stripe acquired Bridge for a reported 1.1 billion dollars, a deal announced in October 2024 and closed in February 2025, Stripe's largest acquisition at the time.
• Built Bridge through the same year as the Terra LUNA and FTX collapses, describing the crypto industry as having been "nuked twice."
• Became interim CEO of Open Standard on June 30, 2026, running a shared-issuance stablecoin model structurally opposite to the open-issuance thesis behind Bridge.