Executive Summary
Stripe processed over $1 trillion in payments in 2025 with 34% growth, but the real signal lies in cohort acceleration. Patrick Collison reports that 2025 businesses are both more numerous and individually outperforming all prior cohorts, with 2026 showing potential further acceleration. This isn't just payment volume growth—it's structural demand shift toward AI-native commerce infrastructure. The Collisons identify a critical bottleneck: current payment rails and blockchains cannot handle the millions-to-billions of transactions per second that agent commerce will require. Their Tempo blockchain incubation directly addresses this infrastructure gap. The thesis extends beyond payments to software architecture itself, shifting from mass-produced applications to bespoke, inference-generated experiences 'cooked fresh at the moment of use.' This fundamental change in software economics breaks traditional winner-take-all dynamics as inference costs create new unit economics. Stripe's positioning across both traditional payment rails and next-generation blockchain infrastructure, combined with partnerships across major retailers (Walmart, Best Buy, Etsy, Shopify), creates a unique vantage point for capturing the agent commerce transition. The Q1 2026 acceleration suggests this transition is happening faster than consensus expects.
Key Insights
what John and Patrick Collison said“When we look at the cohorts, and then when we look at the businesses that signed up in 2023 and their progression and trajectory over the subsequent months, the businesses that signed up in 2024, and then the business signed up in 2025, there has been a phased transition in 2025, where there are both more of them and on a per-business basis, they are on average doing better.”
what John and Patrick Collison said“The world is going to need platforms that support millions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or platform does today.”
what John and Patrick Collison said“Up until now, the economics of software have been conceived of as fixed cost and then infinitely monetized or monetized as much as possible. That has these kind of winner take all dynamics. But once there are inference costs and custom creation involved, it really shifts.”
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