Today Klarna announced plans to launch a dollar stablecoin in 2026, KlarnaUSD, on the Tempo blockchain founded by Stripe and Paradigm. It is partnering with Stripe subsidiary Bridge for the issuance. Last year Klarna processed gross merchandise volume of $112 billion and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September. While its market capitalization was $17 billion at the time, it has since dropped to $11 billion.
“With 114 million customers and $112 billion in annual GMV, Klarna has the scale to change payments globally: with Klarna’s scale and Tempo’s infrastructure, we can challenge old networks and make payments faster and cheaper for everyone,” said Sebastian Siemiatkowski, co-founder and CEO of Klarna. “Crypto is finally at a stage where it is fast, low-cost, secure, and built for scale. This is the beginning of Klarna in crypto.”
The stablecoin strategy builds directly on Klarna’s banking operations. While Klarna is known as a buy-now-pay-later firm, it funds 95% of its credit from customer banking deposits – it holds a Swedish banking license and had $14 billion in customer deposits as of June 2025 across 14 European jurisdictions. But it doesn’t currently earn deposit interest in the United States. That’s where a US dollar stablecoin could help. On the topic of generating revenues from stablecoins, Klarna is an interesting example when it comes to what sort of stablecoin remuneration is allowed in the US and Europe.
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