Karl Durrance, Stripe ANZ Managing Director

At its latest Tour keynote, Stripe laid out, in granular detail, the infrastructure it’s betting on for a commerce future run increasingly by AI agents rather than people. ANZ managing director Karl Durrance told the crowd that most business leaders it surveyed now expect roughly a tenth of their online revenue to come through agentic channels within two years. That tracks closely with McKinsey’s estimate that agentic commerce could generate $3–5 trillion in revenue globally by 2030. Payments lead Clara Liang followed with the major pieces: agentic commerce integrations already live inside ChatGPT, Copilot, Meta’s ad surfaces and Google’s Gemini app, backed by a new open standard, the Machine Payments Protocol, that lets any service tell a shopping agent it needs to pay, over plain HTTP.

Clara Liang, Chief Business Operations Manager

However, Stripe is not alone in pursuing this market opportunity. Major card schemes including Visa and Mastercard are contesting it from a different angle. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP), launched in October 2025 with Cloudflare, lets merchants cryptographically verify that an AI agent is legitimate and carries a recognised consumer behind it. Stripe itself is one of TAP’s launch partners, alongside Coinbase, Adyen and Shopify. Mastercard has built a parallel stack of Agentic Tokens and an Agent Pay framework that scopes a tokenised card credential to a specific agent, merchant and consent policy. Both companies are working under the broader industry banner of “Know Your Agent” (KYA), verifying agent identity the way KYC verifies a customer’s. The structural difference matters: Visa and Mastercard sit underneath every card regardless of who issued it, so they can build agent trust once and have it apply everywhere. Stripe, as a processor rather than a network, doesn’t have that same reach by default. It’s agentic ambitions depend on merchants routing through Stripe specifically, or on Stripe owning the consumer relationship directly, such as through its Link wallet.

Stripes Stablecoin Money Movement Layer

Underneath all of this, Stripe has been building a stablecoin stack largely in-house. Sophie Sakellariadis detailed Bridge for cross-border orchestration, Privy for wallets, a purpose-built blockchain called Tempo, and a new multi-issuer stablecoin, Open USD, backed by more than 140 companies. Link, Stripe’s 300-million-user consumer wallet, can now hold stablecoins directly. That’s the groundwork agentic commerce will eventually build on top of.

Sophie Sakellariadis, Head of Stable Coins and Global Money Management

Stablecoin use cases are already playing out at far larger scale elsewhere in finance. We explored the emergence of real-world-asset tokenisation with KPMG’s Karim Raffa and others back in 2024 (Beyond the Hype on Crypto and Blockchain). Recently SoFi, a US nationally chartered bank with roughly 15 million members, launched its own dollar-backed stablecoin, SoFiUSD, in May, and has since signed a settlement partnership with Mastercard aimed at cross-border remittances and faster card settlement. Robinhood has pushed into asset backed tokenisation of unlisted shares. This included unauthorised pre IPO tokens in Space X earlier this year with trading volume above $20 billion. At Stripe Tour, Sharesies co-CEO Brooke Roberts described similar use case adoption with Australian and New Zealand businesses settling cross-border treasury flows in USDT and USDC to escape exchange-margin and time-zone friction.

Robbie Preswick, Stripe with Sharesies co-CEO Brooke Roberts, Coinbase’s John O’Loghlen, and Westpac’s Caroline Bowler

Westpac’s Caroline Bowler and Coinbase’s John O’Loghlen both pointed that technology is not the bottleneck. Stablecoin adoption is mainly being held back by institutional readiness, board literacy, partner selection, a shortage of staff who understand tokenisation.

So Why Does Stripe Want PayPal?

Stripes agentic commerce vision lands against the backdrop of a story we’ve been tracking since March: Stripe’s pursuit of PayPal (The Agentic Prize). The deal is still live. PayPal rejected a $53 billion offer from Stripe and Advent International in July, but by mid-August the two sides were reportedly back at the table negotiating a higher price, with a deal said to be possible within weeks. Days before the conference, Stripe closed a separate $8 billion acquisition of AI model marketplace OpenRouter, providing further indications of their broader approach in this agentic commerce buildout.

PayPal, notably, isn’t sitting passively waiting to be acquired. It launched its own agentic commerce services last October, and in January partnered with Microsoft, alongside Stripe, to power Copilot Checkout, marketing itself as trusted payments infrastructure, identity verification and buyer protection. It’s worth weighing that against three distinct arguments analysts have made for why Stripe wants the company regardless.

Enterprise scale. PayPal’s unbranded processing arm, Braintree, handles payments behind Uber, Airbnb and DoorDash. Folding that volume into Stripe would be a straightforward scale play; more processing volume, more pricing leverage, and more transaction data to train fraud models.

Consumer trust and the post-purchase lifecycle. There’s more to payments than just the initial transaction. Payments can be followed by disputes, chargebacks and returns, and PayPal has spent two decades building the consumer-facing trust and buyer-protection apparatus around exactly that lifecycle, on top of hundreds of millions of stored cards. It’s not obvious that a login with OpenAI or Google, however large those user bases are, carries the same kind of payments-specific identity and consent history. Those platforms own the shopping interface, not necessarily a persistent record of what a person has authorised a card to do. Stripe has some direct experience of this gap already: its own Agentic Commerce Protocol powered OpenAI’s Instant Checkout, which let ChatGPT users buy without leaving the chat. Even at that modest bar, with a human in the loop, it struggled. Walmart reported conversion rates three times lower than on its own site, and OpenAI pulled back in March, routing purchases to merchant-owned apps instead. Possible reasons for the poor adoption include consumers lacking confidence and being unfamiliar with handing payment details to an AI interface. If that trust gap is real, a wallet with two decades of consumer trust behind it looks like a plausible fix and a clue to why Stripe might want PayPal now.

Bypassing the card networks. This is the newest and most striking argument, and it’s being made on the record by several analysts. A former PayPal insider told ION Analytics the combined platform could eventually route transactions between PayPal wallets and Stripe merchants without touching Visa or Mastercard’s rails at al, potentially eliminating around 200 basis points of interchange cost. PYMNTS’ Karen Webster has argued Stripe wants PayPal’s hundreds of millions of wallet-holding consumers specifically to build a two-sided network for agentic payments running on stablecoins. Mizuho’s Dan Dolev says a combined Stripe-PayPal could become a “meaningful stablecoin player.” As Solayer co-founder Jason Li put it more bluntly: Stripe already has the issuer, the chain and the merchant side; what it doesn’t have is the wallet. Not every analyst buys it. William Blair has questioned whether stablecoins alone justify the price, given Stripe already owns Bridge and PYUSD’s supply is comparatively small.

Stripe doesn’t need PayPal to build agentic payments infrastructure. The Stripe Tour made that case comprehensively. Nevertheless it seems very eager to proceed with the acquistion. Whether PayPal’s board, antitrust regulators and the ongoing price negotiation let Stripe proceed is a story worth watching.

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Author: Ross McIntyre, Associate, Australia, Payments Consulting Network

Ross has been advising retailers and financial institutions on emerging technologies. He has over 15 years of experience in data science, financial analysis, and the preparation of business cases, proposals, and strategies. His experience includes business case lead on several end-to-end supply chain reviews, commercial lead on high-level pricing strategies, profit worker design for retail, business case support for large corporate deals and advising retailers and financial institutions on emerging technologies.

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