At Protocol Labs, we’re building a network designed to accelerate breakthroughs in computing. That starts with identifying exceptional founders long before the rest of the world catches on, often while they’re still working on core R&D. Henri Stern is one of those founders.
We met Henri in 2018, when he joined Protocol Labs to help design Filecoin’s Expected Consensus protocol. His work stood out not just for its technical depth, but for his ability to reason from first principles and build for the long term. Years later, that same mindset led him to co-found Privy, alongside Asta Li, with the conviction that privacy-preserving infrastructure could unlock a more usable and secure web3.
When Privy raised its seed round in April 2022, we didn’t hesitate to back the team. They saw what few others did: that embedded identity — not clunky wallets or brittle user flows — would be essential to onboarding the next wave of users into crypto. As account abstraction was just becoming viable and developers were still stitching together fragmented tooling, Privy quietly built the connective tissue. Their vision: give developers a way to build seamless, secure onboarding experiences on crypto rails, without sacrificing user autonomy.
That vision took off. In just a few years, Privy became a critical piece of infrastructure for builders across the web3 stack, supporting 75M+ accounts and over 1,000 developer teams.
Now, Privy is joining Stripe, one of the most trusted platforms for internet-native commerce. This partnership marks a powerful step forward — not just for Privy, but for the broader movement toward embedding trust and usability into the core of the internet.
“We recognized that crypto infrastructure intimidated the majority of potential end users and created formidable barriers to adoption, so we were drawn to Privy’s vision of abstracting away technical complexity to streamline onboarding,” says Brad Holden, Managing Partner of Protocol VC, “Think of it like this, today many people live in an apartment or house but few know how their plumbing functions. And why should they have to? Privy makes it easy for users to leverage crypto-native tools without understanding the plumbing. We see in Privy the potential to bring the next 100 million users into web3 by making the transition seamless and intuitive.“
Stripe’s acquisition of Privy signals something important: the infrastructure of the decentralized web is becoming indispensable to the future of global finance and commerce. With Privy, Stripe gains a team that deeply understands both cryptography and developer experience, key ingredients for reshaping how identity and value move online.
We’re proud to have supported Privy from the very beginning. And we’re even more excited for what comes next.
Congratulations to Henri, Asta, and the entire Privy team. This is just the beginning.
By Rich Chang
Published on August 6, 2025