Stripe's bet on future commerce: AI and stablecoins jointly drive the launch of "stablecoin financial accounts" and encrypted payment cards

Stripe co-founder and president John Collison at the Stripe Sessions conference

Author: Weilin, PANews

After acquiring the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, payment company Stripe has finally launched its stablecoin service in a big way.

At the Stripe Sessions 2025 conference held in San Francisco from May 6 to 8, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and President John Collison attended the event, where Stripe announced plans to launch "stablecoin financial accounts" in more than 100 countries around the world, allowing merchants and businesses to hold and pay international suppliers. The account will use USDC issued by Circle and USDB stablecoins issued by Stripe's recently acquired Bridge subsidiary.

In his opening keynote speech, John also emphasized how transformational technologies such as 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 focusing on providing support to help businesses adapt and thrive.

Launching "Stablecoin Financial Account", Stripe bets on stablecoin cross-border payments

In February of this year, Stripe acquired the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for US$1.1 billion, which was the company's largest acquisition to date and also set a new record for the largest acquisition in the crypto field at the time. The record was broken three months later when Coinbase acquired Deribit for US$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, but its cryptocurrency plan failed in 2018. The reason given was that "Bitcoin has developed into an asset rather than a means of exchange. This has caused Bitcoin to become less useful for payments." It was not until March 2022 that Stripe announced its return to the crypto field. PayPal can be regarded as an important competitor of Stripe in the payment market.

Now, with the launch of stablecoin financial accounts, merchants and businesses will be able to hold stablecoins, receive funds on crypto and fiat channels (such as ACH and SEPA), and send stablecoins almost anywhere in the world. These accounts will enable entrepreneurs in countries with unstable currencies to hedge against inflation and more easily access the global economy. Stripe will initially support two dollar-denominated stablecoins - USDC and Bridge's USDB, and plans to gradually add more stablecoins in the future.

William Gaybrick, president of product and business at Stripe, told the Stripe Sessions conference: “Many parts of the world face unstable currencies and unreliable infrastructure, which limits the GDP of the Internet... Now, users in Argentina, Vietnam, and everywhere else can hold stablecoins and send and receive funds in both crypto and fiat.”

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

"We should be very unhappy with the state of financial services today," Stripe co-founder and president John Collison told the outside world. "In the financial services sector, invoice fraud is a big problem for businesses, as well as phishing attacks and so on. Although this is a new product, it provides us with an opportunity to bring a higher degree of security in the long run."

Stripe 's headquarters in South San Francisco

Its subsidiary Bridge cooperates with Visa to launch 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 currency. Fintech companies like Ramp, Squads, and Airtm will be able to issue Visa cards tied to stablecoin wallets in dozens of countries. When cardholders make purchases, Bridge deducts funds from their stablecoin balances and converts them into fiat currency, allowing merchants to receive payments in local currency like other transactions. These stablecoin cards can be used at 150 million merchants around the world that accept Visa.

The integration enables the simultaneous launch of new card programs in multiple countries, starting with Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Chile. The focus on Latin America is intended to meet the growing demand among consumers and businesses to use stablecoins to store value and pay for everyday expenses. In the coming months, the payment card will be expanded to countries in Europe, Africa and Asia.

"Stablecoins have not been widely adopted because users face high complexity in the process of participation," Subham Agarwal, Ramp's product director and head of product marketing, recently told the outside world. "Ramp now eliminates this complexity. We tell users that they can trade in any way, and we will automatically guide the transaction to the cheaper, faster and more stable channel."

Visa CEO Ryan McInerney also said that the advertising and payment industries will undergo profound changes as consumers begin to rely on artificial intelligence agents to browse products and complete shopping.

Optimistic about "smart business", AI and stablecoins will become the driving engine

In addition to stablecoin financial accounts, in terms of artificial intelligence, Stripe has launched a tool that enables developers to easily integrate AI agents that can complete purchases on behalf of users into their products. William Gaybrick, president of Stripe products and business, said that, for example, an efficiency app can enable tasks in a to-do list to be "purchased with one click."

"This is a dual revolution of intelligence and currency," Gaybrick said. "Artificial intelligence is obviously changing the way we work and live, and stablecoins are the first truly global, practically usable, and fully programmable currency we have ever had."

The conference also revealed the rapid expansion trend of the Stripe platform. Business on the Stripe platform is growing significantly faster than the traditional market (S&P 500 companies on the Stripe platform are growing seven times faster), processing $1.4 trillion in transactions in 2024. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison emphasized that Stripe is committed to becoming a fast-improving and highly reliable platform, supported by more than 1,000 software updates per day. In addition, Bridge's initial payment volume is growing faster than Stripe's early days.

The guests also pointed out that despite the uncertainty in the global economy, technological advances, especially AI and stablecoins, remain powerful driving forces. AI enables enterprises to significantly expand and accelerate unprecedented growth. Stablecoins significantly reduce friction in global financial transactions, paving the way for "borderless financial services", and are a significant case for global adoption.

Stripe President John Collison proposed a key new concept, "Agentic Commerce," in which AI tools create new sales channels and purchase experiences by facilitating the purchase and interaction of AI models in business transactions. This involves AI models purchasing and integrating other tools directly in the AI interface, completely changing the way sales are done. John Collison demonstrated the use of Cursor (AI programming tool) to build applications and use AI to purchase services directly on Vercel, showing the practical application of Agentic Commerce.

Dwarakesh Patel, author of The Scaling Era, further discussed the development trajectory of AI. He pointed out that the current limitations of AI (e.g., long-term memory, the ability to perform extended autonomous tasks) still need to be improved, but he emphasized that its rapid development indicates that AI will significantly improve productivity in the future, which may far exceed the economic impact of previous technologies such as the Internet, and become an efficient and scalable "digital worker."

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