Reflections on Stripe Sessions 2025
Stripe kicked off its annual conference yesterday, with today being the main event.
They made BIG announcements falling into 2 buckets: AI and stablecoins. All the new features they announced were in service of their goal: being an open network that enables fast, programmable money. Why open? Well, it hits on their two areas of interest:
1️⃣ AI: The more people use you, the more data you get, and the better your AI model becomes.
2️⃣ Stablecoins: If you can make money movement easy, you can increase the velocity of money and take a cut of that bigger pie.
They announced a suite of features, from adding your own processor to no-code ways to build rules on their APIs. The easier it is to use Stripe, even if you don't use Stripe’s processing, the more data they get.
Stripe is making a huge push into B2B payments. They are doing this by...
➡️ Allowing merchants to have multi-currency accounts directly on Stripe, where money moves instantly between these accounts/currencies.
➡️ Allowing merchants to easily pay each other from their Stripe balances, removing the need to pay via CC (costing 2.9%) or via ACH (long settlement times). This is cheap and instant.
➡️ Allowing merchants to issue credit cards from their accounts.
With these features, Stripe is becoming a one-stop shop for FinTech services and maybe even a bank…
If you’re a stablecoin nerd, you see the vision here. Merchants have accounts. Those accounts can one day hold, oh, I don't know, USDB? (Bridge's stablecoin) and now Stripe earns the yield on that account’s balance. With that yield, Stripe can incentivize merchants to use Stripe more (offering discounts, maybe even paying them) and slowly wean businesses off traditional banking rails and onto stablecoin rails underneath Stripe.
If everyone is on Stripe, there’s no need to on/off-ramp with slow, antiquated rails. And if money moves fast, cheaper, and more often, AI models get better, and Stripe can improve its services. It’s a beautiful flywheel.
Stablecoins are the ultimate real-time payment (RTP) system, but global. Companies that use Stripe for stablecoin merchant acceptance sell into 2x as many countries, and their order values for those paying in stables are 3x higher than fiat. 😱 🚀
Stripe continues to push forward stablecoins in a way that is a huge benefit for us all working in this space. If you're working on merchant acceptance like Loop Crypto, you can power merchants that use Stripe’s billing as another processor offering different capabilities (such as subscriptions, more wallet coverage, networks and tokens, cheaper fees) or power competitor systems like OpenPay.
Stripe is putting stablecoins in millions of merchants’ hands. This grows the base of users wanting to spend in crypto. These merchants will become comfortable with other services in the space and require crypto-specific tools like payment verification, fraud detection, and lending...all the services Stripe has in fiat, but for stablecoins.
