William M. Peaster
William M. Peaster covers cryptocurrency and digital asset markets for Yahoo Finance, with a focus on how stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure are reshaping mainstream payments and corporate deal-making.
Stablecoins at the center of payments consolidation
Peaster’s recent work on Stripe’s bid for PayPal treats the story primarily as a stablecoin and infrastructure play rather than just a large-cap takeover. He details the offer terms - a cash bid of $60.50 per share, implying a valuation of roughly $53 billion for PayPal and backed by about $50 billion in committed bank financing - and uses those specifics to frame the scale of the potential consolidation in payments. His coverage highlights how Stripe, alongside Advent International, is not only pursuing consumer reach but also seeking control over a stablecoin infrastructure stack built around assets such as PYUSD and USDC and platforms like Bridge.
He positions the deal as a way to place that stack next to a network serving more than 400 million active accounts, making stablecoin rails and mainstream payments part of the same story rather than separate beats.
In this Stripe–PayPal reporting, Peaster repeatedly surfaces the strategic logic behind the transaction: vertical integration of fiat on-ramps, merchant processing, and on-chain settlement.
He explains how Stripe has spent years building stablecoin rails, including crypto onramps and the acquisition of Bridge for infrastructure to issue, store, convert and move digital dollars, and shows how PayPal’s PYUSD and its consumer-facing wallet base would slot into that system. He also notes the premium Stripe and Advent are offering relative to PayPal’s pre-bid share price and the board’s view of the bid as inadequate, keeping the corporate negotiation context in view while returning to the implications for stablecoin distribution and control.
The result is coverage that treats stablecoins as the core of the thesis for a major payments deal, not a side feature.
Interrogating the ‘casino economy’ through DeFi platforms
Peaster extends this structural approach to yield platforms and DeFi projects, as seen in his piece “EtherFi’s Bet Against Crypto’s Casino Economy.” By choosing a headline that explicitly frames EtherFi’s strategy as a bet against the sector’s “casino economy,” he signals an interest in how protocols position themselves relative to speculative trading and leverage.
His EtherFi coverage uses the project as a lens on broader questions about whether crypto yield platforms can build more durable business models and investor narratives than short-term speculation. This focus on the tension between yield, risk and sustainability complements his stablecoin work, showing him returning to the theme of how crypto products fit into a more disciplined financial stack rather than pure gambling.
Deal terms, infrastructure and market structure
Across these pieces, Peaster consistently combines hard deal terms with infrastructure detail and market-structure analysis. He brings in specific numbers - offer price per share, total deal value, committed financing, and account counts - and uses them to anchor discussions of how much economic weight sits behind stablecoin strategies and DeFi experiments. His Stripe–PayPal reporting describes the build-out of a “stablecoin infrastructure stack” in practical terms, outlining how rails around USDC, onramps, and Bridge’s tooling for digital dollars could interact with PayPal’s PYUSD and wallet base.
In the EtherFi work, he frames one platform’s choices in terms of whether crypto can move beyond a casino-like environment, again tying product design back to market structure.
Peaster’s format tends toward explanatory features that unpack why a transaction or protocol matters, rather than brief price or headline updates. He shows a preference for stories where crypto intersects with payments networks, corporate finance and capital allocation, using those points of contact to examine who will own and operate the rails that move digital dollars. For a story that involves both traditional firms and crypto-native infrastructure, his coverage keeps both sides on stage: he details the mechanics of the bid and financing while explaining what it could mean for stablecoin issuance, custody and merchant acceptance. Taken together, his work marks him out as a crypto reporter whose primary interest lies in stablecoins, payment rails and the business logic of yield platforms, rather than day-to-day token prices.
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Allie Garfinkle
Allie Garfinkle covers the people, capital, and technology moving private markets, with crypto treated as part of dealmaking around AI and frontier startups. She is a senior writer and editor at Fortune and edits Term Sheet, its weekday newsletter on venture capital, private equity, and startup funding. Her reporting focuses on new funds, rounds, exits, software, infrastructure, AI, cybersecurity, climate tech, health tech, consumer brands, and private-market risk. She has covered Laravel, insurtech funding, OpenAI, Demis Hassabis and Isomorphic Labs, Nikesh Arora, and the role of AI in climate-tech deals. She also hosts the Term Sheet podcast, contributes to BBC’s Business Matters, co-chairs the Brainstorm conference series, and moderates industry events. Earlier, she covered Amazon, Google, and Meta and helped produce PBS Frontline business documentaries. She explains wider market shifts through individual companies, deals, data, and investor perspectives.
Anastasia Chernikova
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Anushka Basu
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