As the global crypto community descends into Singapore for this year's Token2049, the mood in the once battered industry has brightened considerably. Traditional financial institutions, which have occasionally been present in past editions, now feature prominently. Formerly viewed as outcasts, crypto natives have become essential partners in modernizing and digitalizing legacy infrastructure.
The event is further expected to showcase how the sector can support emerging AI use cases, and what came of the “pivot to AI” that experts suggested so enthusiastically. Agentic finance has become the latest craze. Programmable money will increasingly adopt and rely on blockchains and stablecoins.
Payment infrastructure provider Stripe, which just wrapped up its own Asia tour in Tokyo, is already heavily relying on both. The company, now valued at $159 billion, catapulted itself to the top of the payment technology sector, with a flurry of acquisitions and new digital features.
The emergence of robotic finance
In Singapore, the firm touted how users can build new businesses effortlessly from a simple prompt. Stripe created a machine payment protocol as an open standard, providing specifications for agents and services to execute payments programmatically. It enables microtransactions and recurring payments via stablecoins, fiat money, or cards.
Currently, a purchase can be quite cumbersome, requiring an agent to create an account, navigate a pricing page, choose between subscription tiers, enter payment details, and set up billing, which still involves human intervention, the firm says.
Businesses can connect their product listing to Stripe and subsequently select which AI agents they'd like to sell through. Stripe says it helps with discovery, checkout, payments, and fraud detection. It creates cards and fast global payouts to over 100 countries through stablecoins.
The company claims that payments jumped for its users after they made the integration. Clients can store the currency they get paid in or convert it via API and hold it in treasury. In order to further bolster the service, Stripe in August spent $7.5 billion to acquire OpenRouter, an API marketplace with access to hundreds of AI models.
Why crypto rails are better
Zach Abrams, the co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure platform Bridge, which Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion early last year, believes that digital tokens are the future of commerce. Speaking at Stripe's Singapore event, Abrams thinks that microtransactions will be the true catalyst for internet money, as they are immediate, integrated, borderless, and programmable.
In March this year, Stripe launched Tempo, a layer 1 blockchain tailored to its stablecoin needs, which it developed together with the established crypto firm Paradigm. Before that, in June of last year, it bought Privy, a digital wallet infrastructure that onboards users to the crypto world.
Abrams explains how these tools have become a fundamental part of its global payment infrastructure. Félix Pago, a Stripe client, quickly managed to grab more than 5% of the massive $60 billion cross-border payment corridor between the US and Mexico.
Stablecoins reduce fees by more than 60%, he says. And payments are nearly instant, compared to a transaction via Swift, that can take over 20 hours. Stripe revealed that stablecoin volume on Tempo has crossed $1 billion in monthly transfer volume.
A new stablecoin standard
The company is not done yet. A week ago, Abrams announced that he will be leaving his role at Stripe to run the newly launched Open USD, an open stablecoin standard that counts firms like Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Shopify and DoorDash among its backers.
The new coin pledges transparency, especially when it comes to cost and governance. It makes supply and reserves publicly available on a website.
Abrams believes that an open standard will drive further adoption. “At Bridge, we made stablecoins more accessible. But our impact was constrained by issuers' economics and incentives,” he wrote on X. “We hope to remove these constraints.”
Stripe has made OUSD the default on its platform, although it will still accept other coins as well, if clients prefer. The move challenges Circle, which has long led the charge in institutional stablecoin adoption.
Towards a duopoly?
The USDC issuer responded by launching its own chain last month, an open layer 1 blockchain named Arc, designed for stablecoin settlement and AI applications. Circle said that Arc kicked off with more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders and more than 100 applications. Among the founding validators are BlackRock, ICE, Mastercard, Visa, MoneyGram, and banks like SBI Group, Standard Chartered and Sumitomo.
Like Stripe, Circle is aggressively building settlement systems for microtransactions and AI agents. The company also recently bought Singapore-based Tazapay for $400 million, becoming a merchant processor able to cover the last mile, the fiat-to-stablecoin conversion.
While Stripe has concluded its Asia tour, Circle will be at Token2049 with a massive presence and a dedicated Circle house set to entice more institutions. And it's probably already plotting its next move in the battle of the stablecoins.
