Stripe Co-Founder: Machine-to-Machine Transactions to Explode, USDC and Tempo as Key Bets

Rise of the Machine Economy: Stripe's Strategic Bet on AI Transactions

In a recent interview, Stripe co-founder and president John Collison noted that AI agents are becoming independent economic entities. This shift will drive a fundamental transformation of global financial infrastructure to support the growing volume of machine-to-machine (M2M) transactions.

Though large-scale M2M transactions haven't fully emerged yet, Collison believes the tipping point is near. Stripe anticipates meaningful AI agent transaction volumes this year and is focusing resources on developing a new payment system tailored for AI-to-AI interactions.

Why USDC and Tempo Are Key Bets

Collison explained that Stripe's deep commitment to USDC is directly tied to this strategic vision. In collaboration with crypto investment firm Paradigm, Stripe helped develop the high-performance blockchain Tempo.

• Tempo was built from the ground up with scalability as the top priority
• Existing blockchains face trade-offs between performance and usability
• AI agents require far higher transaction speed and throughput than human users

Collison emphasized that this is not just about serving current needs, but laying the foundation for the AI-driven digital economy of the future. Stripe aims to build next-generation automated transaction infrastructure through the integration of USDC and Tempo.