Stripe's bet on the future of commerce: driven by AI and stablecoins, launching "stablecoin financial accounts" and encryption payment cards.

Author: Weilin, PANews

After acquiring the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, payment company Stripe has finally launched its stablecoin services on a large scale.

From May 6 to 8, at the Stripe Sessions 2025 conference held in San Francisco, Stripe's CEO Patrick Collison and President John Collison were both in attendance. During the event, Stripe announced plans to launch "stablecoin financial accounts" in over 100 countries worldwide, allowing merchants and businesses to hold and make payments to international suppliers. The account will use USDC issued by Circle and the USDB stablecoin issued by Bridge, a subsidiary recently acquired by Stripe.

In the keynote speech at the opening, John also emphasized how transformative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and stablecoins are reshaping the economy and business. They believe that these innovations bring unprecedented growth opportunities and require new financial infrastructure, and Stripe is focused on providing support to help businesses adapt and thrive.

launched "stablecoin financial accounts", Stripe bets on stablecoin cross-border payments

In February this year, Stripe acquired the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for $1.1 billion, marking its largest acquisition to date and setting a record for the biggest acquisition in the cryptocurrency sector at that time, which was later broken three months later when Coinbase acquired Deribit for $2.9 billion.

Stripe was founded in 2009 by Irish brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison. As early as 2014, Stripe became one of the first payment companies to accept Bitcoin payments; however, its cryptocurrency plans ended in failure in 2018. The reason given was that "Bitcoin has developed into an asset rather than a medium of exchange. This has made Bitcoin less useful for payments." Until March 2022, Stripe announced its return to the crypto space. PayPal can be seen as an important competitor to Stripe in the payment market.

Now, by launching stablecoin financial accounts, merchants and businesses will be able to hold stablecoins, receive funds through crypto and fiat channels (such as ACH and SEPA), and send stablecoins to almost anywhere in the world. These accounts will enable entrepreneurs in currency-unstable countries to hedge against inflation and gain easier access to the global economy. Stripe will initially support two USD-pegged stablecoins—USDC and Bridge's USDB—and plans to gradually add more stablecoins in the future.

William Gaybrick, the President of Products and Business at Stripe, stated at the Stripe Sessions conference: "Many regions of the world face unstable currencies and unreliable infrastructure, which limits the GDP of the internet... Now, users from Argentina, Vietnam, and other places can hold stablecoins and send and receive funds through both crypto and fiat channels."

The stablecoin financial account also supports holding British pounds, euros, and US dollars. This expansion also means that the company's global business footprint has doubled - previously, Stripe accounts were only available in 50 countries.

"We should be very dissatisfied with the current state of financial services," said John Collison, co-founder and president of Stripe. "In the financial services sector, invoice fraud is a major issue that businesses face, along with phishing attacks and so on. While this is a new product, it provides us with an opportunity to bring about a higher level of security in the long run."

*Stripe is headquartered in *South San Francisco

The subsidiary Bridge collaborates with Visa to launch a crypto payment card.

On April 30, Bridge partnered with Visa to launch the world's first payment card product that makes stablecoin balances as easy to spend as fiat. Fintech companies like Ramp, Squads, and Airtm will be able to issue Visa cards tied to stablecoin wallets in dozens of countries. When a cardholder makes a purchase, Bridge deducts funds from their stablecoin balance and converts them into fiat currency, enabling merchants to receive payments in their local currency just like any other transaction. These stablecoin cards can be used at 150 million merchants worldwide that accept Visa.

This integration enables the simultaneous issuance of new card programs in multiple countries, starting with Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Chile. Focusing on Latin America aims to meet the growing demand from consumers and businesses for using stablecoins to store value and pay for everyday expenses. In the coming months, the payment cards will expand to countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

"The reason stablecoins have not been widely adopted yet is that users face high complexity during the participation process," said Subham Agarwal, Ramp's Director of Product and Head of Product Marketing, in a recent statement. "Ramp now eliminates this complexity; we tell users that they can trade in any way, and we will automatically guide the transactions to cheaper, faster, and more stable channels."

Ryan McInerney, CEO of Visa, also stated that as consumers begin to rely on AI agents to browse products and complete purchases, profound changes will occur in the advertising and payment industries.

Optimistic about "intelligent business models", AI and stablecoins will become the driving engines.

In addition to stablecoin financial accounts, Stripe has launched a tool in the field of artificial intelligence that enables developers to easily integrate AI agents that can represent users in making purchases into their products. William Gaybrick, President of Products and Business at Stripe, stated that, for example, an efficiency application could allow tasks in a to-do list to be completed with a "one-click purchase."

"This is a dual revolution of intelligence and currency," Gaybrick said. "Artificial intelligence is clearly changing the way we work and live, while stablecoins are our first truly global, practically usable, and fully programmable currency like never before."

The conference also revealed the rapid expansion trend of the Stripe platform. The business growth rate on the Stripe platform is significantly faster than that of traditional markets (the growth rate of S&P 500 companies on the Stripe platform is seven times faster), processing $1.4 trillion in transactions in 2024. Stripe's CEO Patrick Collison emphasized Stripe's commitment to becoming a rapidly improving and highly reliable platform, supported by evidence of over 1,000 software updates daily. Additionally, the early payment volume of Bridge is growing faster than early Stripe.

The guests present also pointed out that despite the uncertainties in the global economy, technological advancements, especially AI and stablecoins, remain powerful driving forces. AI enables businesses to scale significantly and accelerates unprecedented growth. Stablecoins greatly reduce friction in global financial transactions, paving the way for "borderless financial services," and are considered a significant case of global adoption.

Stripe President John Collison introduced a key new concept called "Agentic Commerce," where AI tools create entirely new sales channels and purchasing experiences by facilitating the purchase and interaction of AI models within business transactions. This involves AI models directly purchasing and integrating other tools within the AI interface, fundamentally changing the way sales are conducted. John Collison demonstrated live how to build applications using Cursor (an AI programming tool) and purchase services directly on Vercel using AI, showcasing the practical application of Agentic Commerce.

In "The Scaling Era," author Dwarakesh Patel further discusses the trajectory of AI development. He points out that the current limitations of AI (such as long-term memory and the ability to perform extended autonomous tasks) still need improvement, but he emphasizes that its rapid development indicates that future AI will significantly enhance productivity, potentially far surpassing the economic impact of previous technologies like the internet, becoming efficient and scalable "digital workers."

At the conference, John Collison stated, "The true achievement of stablecoins is that they are enabling borderless financial services." Clearly, Stripe has demonstrated its ambition in this field with its strategic layout.