Stripe just dropped a super long 2025 annual report, and after reading through it, the biggest takeaway is that Stripe is eyeing the Machine Payment track to grab a piece of the pie. M2M, aka Machine to Machine, is currently one of the classic “winner-takes-all + high-growth” tracks in the early stages of crypto. It’s also a track driven by essential demand with massive potential market space. M2M allows AI Agents to make micropayments directly using stablecoins (based on x402) for things like API calls and MCP usage. Essentially, it enables AI Agents to pay autonomously like humans, evolving from “helping humans shop” to “becoming paying customers themselves.” From Stripe’s public acquisitions of crypto-native infrastructure projects like Bridge, Privy, and Valora, as well as its collaboration with @paradigm to build its own payment chain @tempo, you can clearly see its ambition to dominate the M2M space. As of now, Stripe has very few true competitors in the M2M niche. The biggest threat comes from @coinbase, which is directly leading the development of the x402 protocol, and its public chain @base. This cycle is shaping up to be a legendary showdown between Stripe and Coinbase in the M2M track. Stay tuned!