Stripe Predicts Boom in Agentic Commerce Using Stablecoins

Background and Context

Stripe published its 2025 annual letter on February 24, 2026, alongside a tender offer valuing the company at approximately $159 billion. The letter highlighted accelerating adoption of stablecoins, AI-driven payments, and automated commerce tools.

Stripe has already launched products to support this transition. Its Agentic Commerce Suite allows AI agents to complete transactions autonomously, including micropayments for APIs, software, and digital services. These tools demonstrate real-world use cases for agentic commerce stablecoins, where AI agents function as independent economic actors.

Stripe has steadily expanded its crypto infrastructure to support these capabilities. In late 2024, the company acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge for $1.1 billion, completing the deal in early 2025. Following this acquisition, Stripe launched stablecoin financial accounts in 101 countries and partnered with OpenAI to support agent-based payment systems.

These investments have already delivered measurable growth. Stablecoin transaction volumes on Stripe and Bridge increased more than fourfold in 2025. Industry-wide stablecoin activity also doubled, driven by real business use cases such as cross-border payments and automated financial operations.

Implications for Blockchain Infrastructure

Collison’s forecast highlights a key requirement for blockchain infrastructure. Networks must support high transaction throughput, low fees, and near-instant settlement to enable agent-driven payments.

AI agents will likely execute frequent transactions, including purchasing data, paying for compute services, licensing digital content, and sending global payments. Traditional financial systems cannot handle this level of automation efficiently. In contrast, stablecoins allow instant and programmable settlement without intermediaries.

This shift could accelerate blockchain adoption across enterprise sectors. Businesses using Stripe’s stablecoin accounts may expand into agent-driven workflows, while high-performance blockchain networks could see increased demand.

However, challenges remain. Regulators must define clear rules for AI-driven financial activity. Developers must also solve identity verification and interoperability between AI systems and blockchain networks. Networks that fail to deliver fast and low-cost settlement risk losing relevance as adoption accelerates.

Road Ahead

Stripe has positioned itself as a core infrastructure provider for the emerging agent economy. The company integrates agent commerce tools, stablecoin infrastructure, and payment orchestration into a unified platform.

Stripe already supports payments for leading AI companies and has introduced tools that allow agents to transact independently while preserving business relationships.

Stripe’s leadership believes stablecoins and AI agents will drive the next phase of internet commerce growth. The company’s early investments and infrastructure expansion place it in a strong position to support the transition toward autonomous, programmable financial systems.