Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal

The answer that emerged was blunt. PayPal looks stale in the US startup world, where Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link, and card-on-file checkouts have eaten most of the original value proposition. If your baseline is modern US software or big merchant checkout flows, PayPal can feel like a relic. But that framing breaks the moment you leave that bubble. Across Germany in particular, and in parts of France, Italy, Australia, South Africa, and cross-border European commerce, people still reach for PayPal because it solves very practical problems. Many shoppers do not want to type card details into random stores. Some do not have internationally usable cards at all. Some want buyer protection that feels faster and more predictable than dealing with a bank. Merchants keep it because conversion is real, especially on smaller or less familiar sites. A lot of the discussion ended up being about payments infrastructure, not PayPal. Europeans pointed out that instant bank transfer systems like SEPA instant, Bizum, iDEAL, Wero, Vipps, and other bank-backed rails are steadily shrinking the space where PayPal used to be the only easy answer. At the same time, those systems are fragmented by country, still uneven in rollout, and not always built for ecommerce dispute handling. In the US, people were incredulous that simple bank-to-bank consumer payments are still awkward enough to need Zelle, Venmo, or mailed checks, which helps explain why middlemen survive. So the consensus was not that PayPal has a bright future. It was that calling it dead is lazy. It is a mature cash machine with strong regional pockets, a giant installed base, and a product that many people dislike but still use because the replacements are incomplete, local, or better for merchants than for buyers.