Stripe moves into agentic commerce via stablecoin and AI offerings

As more companies explore AI-agent- and cryptoasset-powered commerce, payments giant Stripe is moving deeper into the stablecoin market, this time also releasing a new AI offering.

The company announced its Open Issuance product, aimed at businesses looking to launch their own stablecoins, or tokens usually backed by traditional money. The company claims that this new service helps launch a stablecoin “with just a few lines of code.”

According to Stripe, all new stablecoins will be “fully interoperable” with any others issued via Open Issuance, thereby increasing their liquidity.

“Crucially, businesses can generate rewards for originating stablecoins on their platform, and use earnings from these rewards to incentivize their customers,” the company said, adding that its Optimized Checkout Suite now accepts stablecoin payments by default.

US businesses can already hold stablecoin balances, convert between fiat currencies, spend stablecoin balances with a locally issued card, and send stablecoins cross-border to crypto wallets.

Stripe accelerated its expansion into the stablecoin market this year when it acquired the stablecoin infrastructure platform Bridge for $1.1 billion, and soon after partnered with Visa to launch a stablecoin card-issuing product.

Meanwhile, as more crypto and traditional companies explore AI-agent-enabled commerce, Stripe also released the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which it describes as “a new standard that already powers the new Instant Checkout in ChatGPT.”

“ACP establishes a shared language between merchants and AI agents. With a single integration, merchants can sell through AI agents while retaining control over their brand, catalog, fulfillment, and customer relationships. ACP is an open standard: it works across AI agents, and businesses can adopt it even if they don’t process payments with Stripe,” the company explained.

Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic, Perplexity, Vercel, Lovable, Replit, and Manus were listed among the “early partners” of this solution.

Meanwhile, in September, in a sign of growing investment in the agentic commerce market, major crypto exchange Coinbase partnered with Cloudflare, a web security and performance company, to launch the x402 Foundation, which aims to become “the universal standard for AI-driven payments” by implementing stablecoin-based transactions.

However, as previously reported, centralized stablecoins can be easily frozen or seized. Because of this, Bitcoin (BTC) developers estimate that the decentralized and censorship-resistant BTC could become the currency of choice for AI agents looking to fulfill various tasks.