Text | Lin Wanwan

Money has already resided in the code.

Half a year ago, AI payment was merely a presentation slide at a conference. Today's AI is becoming the "cash register."

Now, when you open ChatGPT and search for any product, you will see a blue Buy button. Fill in the address, make the payment, and arrange for shipping. The entire process does not redirect; no webpage opens.

Last week, Google also caught up, integrating Etsy and Wayfair products in its search and Gemini, allowing direct checkout within the conversation. Microsoft's Copilot simultaneously launched its shopping checkout feature. Meta's Zuckerberg just announced a full shift toward AI-driven commerce.

But a deeper business story is quietly unfolding, the toll fee conflict over AI payments needs to be traced back to the two major AI payment camps expected in the fall of 2025.

On September 16, Google gathered over 60 companies to release an "AI Agent Payment Agreement."

The list is full of familiar faces from traditional finance: Mastercard, PayPal, American Express, plus a few allies from the tech circle.

On the 29th of the same month, Stripe and OpenAI issued another set of agreements called the Agentic Commerce Protocol, abbreviated as ACP. Stripe also announced that it was testing ACP-based agency commerce solutions with AI companies like Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic, and Perplexity—all AI native players.

The two lists have very few intersections. Coinbase appears in Google's AP2 ecosystem while also being a long-term partner of Stripe.

What these two camps are competing for is a seemingly ordinary yet trillion-dollar question: When AI spends money for humans, through whose pipeline does the money flow?

You might think this is far from you. But consider this: you're currently asking ChatGPT to book a flight for you, having an AI assistant comparing prices for purchases, or letting an Agent automatically buy office supplies—these scenarios are visibly becoming a reality. Every transaction needs a pipeline to transfer money from your pocket to the merchant.

Whoever fixes this pipeline can charge a toll fee on every transaction.

This is the essence of this war.

12 Months of Change at a Round Table

The story begins at a dinner gathering.

In the summer of 2024, Stripe hosted Wally Adeyemo, then Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, at its headquarters in San Francisco, holding a fintech roundtable.

A group of payment company owners sat together to chat, among them were two people who had never met before: Stripe's CEO Patrick Collison and a young man named Zach Abrams.

Abrams has quite a background. He and his partner Sean Yu are serial entrepreneurs; they sold their first company, Evenly (a P2P transfer service similar to the U.S. version of Venmo), to Square (now called Block) in 2013.

Later, Abrams went to Coinbase as the head of consumer products and served as the chief product officer of Brex; Yu worked as an engineer at DoorDash and Airbnb. In 2022, they reunited to co-found Bridge, helping businesses access stablecoin payments. Clients include Coinbase and SpaceX.

The topic of that roundtable was initially broad, but Abrams later recalled that he was shocked: over 90% of the time was spent discussing stablecoins, even though he was the only stablecoin company present.

Before that, Bridge had been pursuing Stripe as a client, hoping to integrate its technology into Stripe's payment system. But after that roundtable, the direction shifted. Collison began meeting with Abrams frequently, and instead of discussing cooperation, they talked about acquisition.

In October 2024, Stripe announced the acquisition of Bridge for $1.1 billion. Bridge had just completed a $40 million Series A funding round in March 2024, with a valuation of $200 million.

The acquisition price was 5.5 times the valuation, and based on revenue multiples, it could exceed 100 times. Sequoia Capital remarked after the investment that they believe Bridge will join the ranks of Instagram, YouTube, PayPal, and WhatsApp, becoming "one of those companies that realized its full potential after being acquired."

In February 2025, the deal officially closed. Bridge's 60-person team moved into Stripe's San Francisco headquarters and participated in Stripe's new employee training camp held every two weeks.

This was just the first step.

What followed happened quickly. In May 2025, Stripe launched stablecoin financial accounts, allowing businesses in 101 countries to directly hold stablecoin balances and transact globally with stablecoins.

In the same month, ChatGPT launched a shopping recommendation feature, allowing users to search for products within the chat window, compare options, and then jump to merchants' websites to place orders.

In June, they acquired the wallet company Privy.

Privy's job was straightforward: to enable any app to embed a digital wallet, allowing users to complete on-chain payments without downloading additional cryptocurrency wallet software. At the time, over 75 million accounts were already using it.

Patrick Collison tweeted a very straightforward remark: "Money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable vaults." Money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable vaults.

In September, they co-incubated the Tempo chain with cryptocurrency investment giant Paradigm, a new blockchain specifically designed for payments. Paradigm's co-founder Matt Huang (also a member of Stripe's board) personally led the team.

The list of companies joining Tempo's design camp reads like an all-star lineup from the payments industry: OpenAI, Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, Visa, Shopify, Standard Chartered, Brazil's largest digital bank Nubank, DoorDash, Revolut, and South Korea's e-commerce giant Coupang.

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison stated that Tempo could process tens of thousands of transactions per second, with sub-second confirmations, and each transaction fee being less than 0.1 cents, with transaction costs quoted in USD stablecoins, eliminating the need to hold highly volatile native tokens.

In the same month, Stripe and OpenAI officially released the ACP agreement, simultaneously launching ChatGPT's Instant Checkout feature—after seeing recommended products in the chat window, users could directly place orders and make payments without redirecting or swiping cards.

The first batch of support came from Etsy merchants, followed by a million merchants on Shopify.

In October, Tempo completed its first round of financing of $500 million, led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital, with participation from Sequoia, Ribbit Capital, and SV Angel, reaching a valuation of $5 billion. A blockchain project that had been established for less than two months achieved a valuation of $5 billion. Stripe and Paradigm themselves did not participate in this round of financing.

In December, Tempo opened for public testing. UBS, Mastercard, and European buy-now-pay-later giant Klarna joined the partner list.

Zach Abrams of Bridge simultaneously announced that Bridge had applied for a national bank trust charter from the U.S., complying with the stablecoin regulatory law, the "GENIUS Act," which takes effect in July 2025.

Putting these events together: $1.1 billion for the ability to issue tokens, creating stablecoin financial accounts, acquiring a wallet company, incubating a dedicated blockchain, and applying for a banking license.

From issuing tokens to building chains to developing wallets to defining agreements to obtaining licenses, Stripe has built each layer itself.

In contrast, Google has over 60 alliances, an open agreement, and a code repository. Google has everything, except for its chain, its stablecoin, and its wallet.

Alliances are the product of meetings among a group of people. Stripe has built a system that one person can launch.

In the month Google released AP2, Tempo was already in testing.

Regardless of Who Wins, Circle Wins

In this war, there is a role that is smarter than Stripe.

It does not take sides, does not fight, and hardly speaks. But regardless of who wins, it wins.

This role is called Circle.

Circle issues a stablecoin called USDC, which is currently the most compliant digital dollar globally.

Another company, Tether, issues USDT on a larger scale, but whether its reserves are sufficient and the reliability of its audits have been debated by regulators for years without a conclusion. Retail investors may not care about these, but in the AI world, there may be hundreds of thousands of automated transactions daily, each of which must withstand an audit. No serious company would dare to build its AI transactions on a stablecoin with questionable compliance.

And Circle? A publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has seen the books, disclosing financial reports every quarter, showing how many U.S. Treasury bonds and how much cash are in reserves, visible to the whole world.

So you see an interesting scenario: Stripe's stablecoin financial accounts support USDC. OpenAI uses USDC through Stripe. Coinbase in Google's camp also connects with USDC.

Two camps are battling fiercely over "entry points," controlling the interface and set of protocols for AI spending. But regardless of who holds the entry point, the money ultimately needs to be converted to stablecoins to proceed on-chain. And in the compliant stablecoin market, USDC has almost no competitors.

Two camps are vying for entry, while Circle capitalizes on the transaction volume.

Here's a set of data. In 2024, the total value of stablecoin transfers worldwide reached $15.6 trillion. What does this number mean? It's roughly equivalent to Visa's total transaction volume for the year.

Something that has been around for less than ten years has already matched the network that Visa took sixty years to build.

And AI transactions have just begun. Consulting firm Edgar Dunn & Co. predicts that by 2030, AI-driven transactions will reach $1.7 trillion. Each of those $1.7 trillion transactions will likely pass through the stablecoin pipeline.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly stated at a Senate hearing in June 2025 that a stablecoin market value of $2 trillion is "a very reasonable expectation."

Patrick Collison himself said: The average interest rate on U.S. bank deposits is only 0.40%, with $4 trillion in bank deposits even at zero interest.

He believes this unconsumer-friendly practice is a 'loser's strategy'; young people will eventually convert their money into higher-yield stablecoins.

He was discussing trends. And Circle perfectly stands at the center of that trend.

Conclusion

Finally, let's pull the lens back a bit.

This standard battle in AI payments superficially looks like two commercial camps fighting for territory. But what it reflects behind is a deeper issue: when AI begins to independently participate in economic activities, is our financial system designed for humans still adequate?

Patrick Collison envisions a future where AI agents are the main participants in economic activities. They compare prices, procure, pay, and settle—without humans pressing any buttons. This is the ultimate in efficiency and the border of risk.

The alliance between Google and traditional finance sees another future: AI should be integrated into the existing financial infrastructure established by humans, bound by existing regulatory rules, and operate within the existing trust framework of humans.

Two futures, two logics, two camps.

But regardless of which future arrives, one thing is certain: AI needs to spend money; money needs to move on-chain, and on-chain settlements require stablecoins.

So Circle continues to win. Stripe and Google continue to fight. Regulators continue to chase. Merchants continue to connect. Consumers remain unaware of which pipeline their money is flowing through.

Until one day, something you purchased with the help of AI has a problem, and you find that no one, not even AI, knows who to approach for a refund.

On that day, everyone will suddenly remember the questions that nobody answered today.

But by that day, the pipeline will have been fixed, and toll fees will have started being collected.

History is always this way: get on the bus first, pay for the ticket later.

Only this time, the bus is moving too fast.

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