Author: Stripe
Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher
Dear Investors:
We are writing this letter because we have just announced that OpenRouter will join Stripe. This is the largest acquisition Stripe has made to date. Previously, we also acquired Bridge, Privy, and Metronome. We would like to take this opportunity to discuss the role of these businesses in Stripe's overall strategy.
Stripe's mission is to promote the sustained growth of the internet economy.
In our view, a more prosperous world relies on the underlying mechanisms that support economic functionality: currency, credit, different currencies, legal structures, and risk management.
We believe that the future world can, and should, be more prosperous than today, and a better economic infrastructure can help make this a reality.
Singularity
“Singularity” is a vague term that may have been overused. However, we consider January 1st of this year to be the start of the "Singularity Era," and we have been operating the company based on this judgment ever since.
When people mention “singularity,” they often associate it with grand predictions about the future. But for us, the reason is much simpler: we see a clear turning point in some long-term trends, such as the significantly faster rate of new company formations. Therefore, we believe this ongoing “qualitative change” should be taken seriously.
It turns out that from the very beginning, Stripe's focus on developing products for developers also naturally aligns with AI programming tools and agents, as they both require programmable interfaces and as simple, frictionless configuration experiences as possible.
Fortunately, because of this, many AI companies around the world have adopted Stripe.
We are also increasingly aware that: building economic infrastructure for the internet largely means building economic infrastructure for AI.
AI will bring significant changes; this is already clear. But no one can accurately predict how it will reshape the world. Many smart predictions made in the past have been proven wrong by reality.
In the face of this uncertainty, we remain cautious and have established two primary goals.
First, we want to accelerate the adoption of AI throughout the entire economic system.
As AI continues to expand what people can do, we are seeing a plethora of exciting new products and services emerge, and this is likely just the beginning. More astonishing creations will appear in the future, which will require financial tools that are different from those of the past and more suited to the AI era.
At the same time, the proliferation of AI in the economy has also brought new problems, such as new types of theft and fraud, which will require more advanced technological means to effectively address.
Ultimately, people's biggest expectation for AI is that it can make society more affluent. We hope to help make that possibility a reality.
Second, there are concerns that AI will cause unemployment or further concentrate power, or even both at the same time.
We believe that the application of AI should enhance human autonomy, not diminish it. Economic autonomy is a foundational element of a free society, and Stripe aims to play a role in protecting that autonomy.
We hope AI will enable more people to start businesses and allow these new enterprises to operate more efficiently, coexist with, and compete against the established, dominant companies.
Current early data indeed supports this judgment, and we have recorded related changes through channels such as Stripe Economics Substack, but no results are predetermined.
As staunch supporters of small companies, we will do our utmost to keep this path open.
We still believe that there is no fixed upper limit to the scale of the global economy. The current total global economy is slightly above $100 trillion. While this may sound unbelievable at first, we think it’s meaningful to imagine a world where the global economy reaches $100 trillion and seriously outline the bottlenecks to achieving this goal.
If the global per capita GDP could reach the current level of approximately $100,000 in Ireland, we would have already achieved about 80% of this target.
Currently, over 5 million businesses use Stripe, and the flow of funds processed by Stripe is approaching 2% of the global GDP.
This is a good start.
However, compared to the scale that is genuinely possible in the coming years, these numbers still seem insignificant.
What We Are Building
From a macro perspective, the global economy is set to grow significantly in the future.
From a micro perspective, the way businesses operate is also changing rapidly.
Existing enterprises are adjusting their business models. Usage-based billing is on the rise, while many traditional billing models are declining; companies are also swiftly launching new products and services, making speed and agility increasingly important.
The rate of new company formations is accelerating.
AI agents are about to become true economic entities.
Stablecoins are rapidly becoming popular. As stablecoins gradually become the native currency of the AI economy, this trend is likely to accelerate further.
With tokens easily flowing across borders, global coverage capability is becoming more important than ever.
We are building the economic tools needed for this era as quickly as possible.
After stablecoins are integrated with agent access capabilities, a new foundational component set for the AI economy is forming:
Discovery and Access (Discovery + onboarding): Stripe Projects, allowing agents to register for third-party services; Stripe Directory, providing product and service discovery for agents; Provisioning API, offering embedded registration capabilities for agents.
Usage Management: Metronome.
Payment: Bridge, responsible for stablecoin orchestration; Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite; Tempo, a blockchain for agents; MPP, the Machine Payment Protocol.
Fund Storage: Privy, providing crypto asset and stablecoin wallets; Open Standard, a new stablecoin.
As time goes on, we expect the composition of the entire tech stack to change: the technology stack built for the "AI economy" will gradually gain more share from the stack built for the "pre-AI era."
However, this transition may not happen in a very obvious way.We are deeply integrating these capabilities into Stripe's existing products and platforms to make it easy for any business to adopt.
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