In its 2025 annual letter, the team at technology and financial company Stripe said that in the near future, the majority of payments will be handled by artificial intelligence (AI) agents, highlighting that the company’s infrastructure is already adapting to so-called “agent commerce,” where AI systems execute transactions autonomously.
The company claims that new AI companies will be global from day one and will need to: Payment system that can be operated on an international scale.
In that sense, the company’s letter highlighted two developments to facilitate agent commerce, in addition to data processing. They promise to carry out payments autonomously.
First, the Stripe team highlighted Tempo, its proprietary blockchain co-developed with Paradigm. The network, introduced in September, is currently in the testing phase (testnetStripe’s letter says its official launch is “imminent.”
Stripe claims that its architecture specifically aims to: Micropayments and automated trading between AI agents.
Companies such as Visa, Nubank and Shopify are already testing it in cases such as cross-border payments and remittances, and Klarna has launched an experimental stablecoin (KlarnaUSD) in the US. testnet To test faster international payments.
Second, the technology company said in the letter that it has worked with OpenAI to develop the Agentic Trading Protocol (ACP), a technology standard for AI platforms and merchants to share a common language when executing trades.
The purpose of this protocol is for agents to not only recommend products and manage information, but also to make payments directly. Under programmed rules.
This latest launch, which is currently operational, is similar to the AI payment protocol developed by the Coinbase exchange called x402 and opens the door to automated payments between AI applications.
Stripe executive calls for “1 billion TPS” network for AI payments
Additionally, the letter, signed by Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison and co-founder John Collison, guarantees that AI agents will require a network. Capable of supporting “1 billion transactions per second”That is, an infrastructure designed to operate at scale and in real time.
Currently, the majority of cryptocurrency networks are very far from those volumes, Stripe manager cannot process specified amount without sacrificing decentralization or security.
For example, the Ethereum ecosystem, including the base layer and second layer (L2) network, processes an average transaction per second (TPS) of approximately 3,000 to 6,000. Solana manages approximately 4,000 TPS.
A viable option to support mass payments between AI agents is Bitcoin’s Lightning Network (LN), a second layer (L2) network that enables direct peer-to-peer (P2P) transmission without recording each transaction on the main chain.
Unlike networks where each operation competes for block space and pays variable fees, Lightning works through a payment channel that is opened once, enables multiple off-chain transfers, and settles the final balance later.
This architecture allows Scale more efficiently and support instant micropayments. In that sense, Blog Liquid’s (possibly optimistic) report for 2022 claims that LN can handle up to 40 million TPS.
However, this scalability depends on practical factors. There is sufficient liquidity within the channelnode adoption will increase and more users and businesses will understand how to operate this technology.
Without capital circulating within the network and a broad base of operators, its theoretical capacity for expansion will not automatically translate into large-scale use.
At that point, the first use cases related to artificial intelligence begin to appear. As reported by CriptoNoticias, the AI agent autonomously created and funded another bot. Use Lightning and Nostr protocols This shows that the infrastructure can already facilitate automatic micropayments between machines.
Additionally, Lightning Labs has launched an open-source toolkit that allows AI agents to send, receive, and authenticate Bitcoin payments using LN without relying on traditional bank accounts. This causes lightning Payment rails for digital servicesThis allows autonomous agents to pay for resources within SATOSHI without using a central billing system.
Similarly, other networks welcome bots and AI programs for payments. As reported by CriptoNoticias, the Ethereum network received a large number of these agents, which subsequently reached other chains, such as Polygon, for example.