Despite a 50% drop in Bitcoin's price, stablecoin payment volume doubled in 2025, with 60% of it representing B2B payments. This divergence signals that stablecoins are maturing into a utility for real-world commerce, independent of the volatile crypto asset markets.
The primary barrier to realizing the benefits of new technologies like AI isn't the tech itself, but a societal structure Stripe calls the "Republic of Permissions." Non-market forces like regulators, committees, and courts create synthetic impediments that prevent economically superior solutions from being adopted.
The traditional model of sequential, country-by-country expansion used by Coca-Cola and even early Google has been replaced. Today’s AI-native companies launch globally from day one, treating the entire internet as their domestic market, enabled by modern financial infrastructure.
Stripe frames unoptimized payment infrastructure not just as a missed opportunity but as an active state of "low-revenue mode." This leakage from poor conversion, authorization, and fraud prevention rates represents one of the highest ROI growth levers a company can pull, often overlooked for splashy ad campaigns.
Competitive markets act as a "sorting machine," concentrating capital and talent faster than ever. This winner-take-all dynamic is intensifying, with the top 10% of the S&P 500 now capturing 59% of total profits, a historical high. This bifurcation is happening within industries, not just between them.
Stripe breaks down the hyped concept of "agentic commerce" into a practical, five-level framework: 1) Eliminating web forms, 2) Descriptive search, 3) Persistence & memory, 4) Delegation of purchasing, and 5) Anticipation of needs. This provides a clear roadmap for how AI will transform online buying.