After acquiring the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, the payment company Stripe has finally launched a stablecoin service on a large scale.
At the Stripe Sessions 2025 conference held in San Francisco from May 6 to 8, 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 globally, allowing merchants and businesses to hold and pay international suppliers. The account will use USDC issued by Circle and USDB stablecoin issued by Bridge, a recently acquired subsidiary.
In the opening keynote, John emphasized how transformative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and stablecoins are reshaping the economy and business. They believe these innovations bring unprecedented growth opportunities and require new financial infrastructure, which Stripe is focused on providing to help businesses adapt and thrive.
Launching "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, which was the company's largest acquisition to date and set a record for the largest acquisition in the crypto space at the time, later broken by Coinbase's $2.9 billion acquisition of Deribit.
Stripe was founded in 2009 by Irish brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison. As early as 2014, Stripe was one of the first payment companies to accept Bitcoin payments. However, its cryptocurrency plans failed in 2018, with the reason given that "Bitcoin has evolved into an asset rather than a means of exchange, making it less useful for payments." It wasn't until March 2022 that Stripe announced a return to the crypto space. PayPal can be seen as Stripe's important competitor in the payment market.
Now, by launching 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 to 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 first support two dollar-denominated stablecoins - USDC and Bridge's USDB, with plans to gradually add more stablecoins in the future.
William Gaybrick, Stripe's President of Product and Business, stated at the Stripe Sessions conference: "Many regions in the world face unstable currencies and unreliable infrastructure, which limits the internet's GDP... 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 accounts also support holding British pounds, euros, and US dollars. This expansion also means doubling the company's global business footprint - previously, Stripe accounts were only available in 50 countries.
"We should be very dissatisfied with the current state of financial services," Stripe co-founder and President John Collison told the outside world. "In financial services, invoice fraud is a major problem for businesses, along with phishing attacks and more. Although this is a new product, it provides us with an opportunity to bring a higher degree of security in the long run."
Subsidiary Bridge Collaborates 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. Financial technology companies like Ramp, Squads, and Airtm will be able to issue Visa cards linked to stablecoin wallets in dozens of countries. When a cardholder makes a purchase, Bridge will deduct funds from their stablecoin balance and convert it to fiat currency, allowing merchants to receive payment in local currency as with other transactions. These stablecoin cards can be used at 150 million Visa merchants worldwide.
The integration enables issuing new card programs in multiple countries, starting first with Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Chile. It focuses on Latin America to meet the growing demand of consumers and businesses to use stablecoins for storing value and paying daily expenses. In the coming months, payment cards will expand to countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
"The reason stablecoins have not been widely adopted is that users face high complexity in the process," Subham Agarwal, Product Director and Product Market Lead at Ramp, recently told the outside world. "Now Ramp eliminates this complexity. We tell users they can transact in any way, and we will automatically guide the transaction to cheaper, faster, and more stable channels."
Visa CEO Ryan McInerney also stated that as consumers begin to rely on AI agents to browse goods and complete shopping, the advertising and payment industries will undergo profound transformation.
Optimistic about "Agentic Commerce", AI and Stablecoins Will Become Driving Engines
In addition to stablecoin financial accounts, Stripe has launched a tool in the AI domain that allows developers to easily integrate AI agents capable of making purchases on behalf of users into their products. William Gaybrick, Stripe's President of Product and Business, said that, for example, an efficiency app could enable a "one-click purchase" for tasks on a to-do list.
"This is a dual revolution of intelligence and currency," Gaybrick said. "AI is clearly changing the way we work and live, while stablecoins are the first truly global, practically usable, and fully programmable currency we've ever had."
The conference also revealed Stripe's rapid platform expansion trend. The growth rate of businesses on the Stripe platform is significantly faster than traditional markets (Stripe platform's S&P 500 enterprise growth is seven times faster), processing $1.4 trillion in transactions in 2024. Stripe's CEO Patrick Collison emphasized Stripe's commitment to being a rapidly improving and highly reliable platform, evidenced by over 1,000 software updates daily. Additionally, Bridge's initial payment volume growth is faster than early Stripe.
Guests at the scene also noted that despite global economic uncertainty, technological advances, especially AI and stablecoins, remain powerful drivers. AI enables businesses to significantly expand and accelerate unprecedented growth. Stablecoins dramatically reduce friction in global financial transactions, paving the way for "borderless financial services" and serving as a notable case of global adoption.
Stripe President John Collison introduced a key new concept of "Agentic Commerce", where AI tools create entirely new sales channels and purchase experiences by facilitating AI model purchases and interactions in commercial transactions. This involves AI models directly purchasing and integrating other tools within the AI interface, fundamentally changing sales methods. John Collison demonstrated using Cursor (an AI programming tool) to build an application and directly purchase services on Vercel through AI, showcasing the practical application of agentic commerce.
Dwarakesh Patel, author of "The Scaling Era", further discussed AI's development trajectory. He pointed out that current AI limitations (such as long-term memory and ability to execute extended autonomous tasks) still need improvement, but emphasized that its rapid development indicates future AI will significantly enhance productivity, potentially far exceeding 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 realizing borderless financial services." Clearly, Stripe has demonstrated ambition in this field through its strategic layout.
Author: Weilin
