Stripe's cross-border payments in #China# jumped around 48% between 2024 and 2025, while the number of Chinese startups using #Stripe# climbed about 30%, Sina Finance reported today, citing the US provider of online payment services. Stripe's Chinese users include AI firms Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Manus, as well as coffee chain Luckin Coffee, and other businesses. Europe and the US remain the main destinations for Chinese firms going global, it said. @stripe @Kimi_Moonshot @MiniMax_AI @ManusAI

Stripe told its investors the singularity began on January 1st. i read that on a morning when my revenue was the same as last August. so i pointed the singularity at my sales: gave it my link, it found buyers and emailed them. $30 free 👇

Stripe is now an ElevenLabs customer! When Piotr and I started @ElevenLabs, one of the first things we did was set up a @Stripe account and every subscription we’ve collected has run through their infrastructure. We're excited that Stripe is now using ElevenAgents to interact with the businesses it serves and ElevenCreative to support its brand and marketing work. Stripe built the payments layer for the internet, serving millions of businesses around the world. Our goal is to make ElevenLabs that layer for customer interaction.

Stripe claims "the singularity" is here, and justifies its $7.5B acquisition of OpenRouter. The truth, as @EquityPod highlights, is much more practical, as unglamorous as token expense management may seem:

Stripe is reportedly eyeing a $7-7.5B deal for OpenRouter. Is that a good deal? Co-Executive Editor @mvpeers: "I think it's a crazy price. I think this is what happens when you are private and you can pay with stock, you don't really think about how much you're paying..." Senior Editor @meredithmazz: "I think Stripe wants to get in early on the next big potential marketplace.”

Stripe claims "the singularity" is here, and justifies its $7.5B acquisition of OpenRouter. The truth, as @EquityPod highlights, is much more practical, as unglamorous as token expense management may seem:

Stripe is buying OpenRouter, the gateway that connects 10 million+ developers to 400+ AI models across 80+ providers. Stripe says those models come from more than 80 providers, processing over 10 trillion tokens per day. Stripe already routes money. OpenRouter routes intelligence. Together, one platform could handle identity, model access, routing, billing, wallets, settlement, and fraud policy for the entire agent economy. Software agents are becoming buyers, sellers, workers, and allocators of capital. The infrastructure layer that serves them will capture enormous power. That's a massive point of control. If one platform handles all of it, it can make agent commerce much easier. It can also decide which actors get accounts, which models receive traffic, which transactions are acceptable, and which jurisdictions are allowed to participate. Stripe clearly expects stablecoins to sit at the center of this market. They're fast, programmable dollars that fit neatly into a world where software pays software every few seconds for compute, data, and completed tasks. But stablecoins are still somebody else's liability, dependent on issuers, banks, reserve assets, and the political rules around the dollar. Bitcoin is the counterweight. It doesn't need Stripe, a bank, or a stablecoin issuer to exist. It gives software and humans a bearer asset with a fixed issuance schedule and a settlement network no company controls. Lightning, ecash, and other bitcoin-native payment systems can give agents a way to transact without turning one private platform into the economic gatekeeper for the machine economy. The default agent economy is being built right now. If open protocols don't earn their place in the stack, identity and money collapse into the same corporate permission layer. That would be a very efficient system. It would not be a free one.