Skip Sessions 2026 observation: Stripe's five years behind in the encryption ring, finished all night

Original author: Cake, Deep tide TechFlow

29 April, San Francisco, Moscow West, Opening Sessions 2026。

The launch went through the second half, and the lights went dark. There's a picture on the big screen that makes the cell phone stand upSam AltmanIn a branded white sweater, sitting on a light-colour couch, opposite which is the president of Stripe, John Collison。

People who are familiar with this image will laugh: it's Sam's second time sitting on the couch of Stripes. Last time, in May 2023, ChatGPT had been on fire for less than six months, and in that conversation, Sam was still arguing with John "Ai has no external risk."。

Three years have passed, and things are human。

Sam ' s OpenAI has become a large object valued at $500 billion and living at 900 million a week; Stripe ' s valuation has increased by 70 per cent over the past year to $15.9 billion; and the joint publication by two companies in September 2025, Agenic Company Protocol (ACP), has allowed ChatGPT users to directly list Etsy, Shopify commodities in the dialogue box。

Sam, this is a signOpenAI's 900 million-week live user commercial channel, bet on Stripe's pipe。

And he sat across the sofa, on the big screen behind John, with the core number of the launch:288I don't know。

This is the number of new products and functions that Stripe has announced this session of Sessions. There were more than 9000 people down there, 1.32 times the number last year. Patrick Collison, at the beginning of the show, was kidding to say that it wasn't "the ones you sneaked in."。

And for the encryption industry, at least 60 of the 288 updates went directly to the Basic Places, and Sam Altman was sitting on the stage with the endorsement。

We're gonna flatten the 288 updates. There's only three. Yes

If you turn on everything we announced at Sessions 2026, the official version of "everything we announced at Sessions 2026" will be flooded with a secret product name, CHeckout stone, Reader T600, Autoration Boost, Smart Disputes, WorldFlows, Custodial subjects, Stripe Console each with a "preview" "GA" "private preview" label, which looks like the Jira of a SaaS company。

But as an editor with Claude MAX account, I'll tell you:All these products, in essence, answer only three questions。

First question: How does money cross borders? The answer is a stable currency。

The second question: The buyer is not a person, it's AI anent, how do you collect the money? The answer is Agentic Company Suite + Machine Payments Protocol。

And the third question: What if the merchant wants to use Stripe as a bank。

If you put these three questions together, you'll find that Stripe is doing something that almost nobody's talking about in public:It's using the compliance identity and distribution capacity of the "paying company" to put a few things that the encryption industry has tried repeatedly over the past five years but has never really entered the mainstream, stabilizing coins, angent economies, chain settlements, one-off into the pipes that Visa, Mastercard, PayPal have already laid。

The subversive nature of the matter is that it does not require users to know that they are using block chains。

Stabilized coins, Stripe may have won

Let's look at some of the unsustainable data。

John Collison presented a map on the proceedings in 2025:Bridge (Strategic Currency Infrastructure Inc. acquired by Stripe) has experienced a sharper increase in payments in the first 24 months than during the same period of his own year。  this is the rare time in Stripe's history to be "faced by his own investment mark" , a stable currency pipeline that starts less than two years, with an increase in speed crushing a Stripe that has ruled the Internet for 10 years。

By 2026, the curve had not turned。

And this session, Stripe's update around the Stable Currency could be said to beFull Inn LevelOn:

• Treasury ' s stable currency account expanded to 41 new markets, plus the previous 100+, meaning that businesses in more than 150 countries can use Stripe to stabilize currency and make cross-border payments. Patrick said on X: "This is the biggest international release we've ever made."
• Stripe Issuing launched a bank card endorsed in a stable currency covering 30 countries, and your stable currency balance can be used directly for consumption。
• Bridge supports various stable currencies such as USDG, CASH, USDSui, which cover Tempo, Plasma, Celo, Sui across the chain。
• Privy allows stable currency balances to be directly linked to the DeFi gains of Morpho, which means that the user's "current account" can theoretically lie down and eat DeFi gains。
• Crypto Onramp supports headless integration with up to $500 free of the full KYC mode. This is an egg for the encrypted App developer. Onramp experiences can be as smooth as Apple Pay。

Put these together. What do you see

A complete "stable currency shadow banking" system。  cross-border collection of money, storage, interest collection, swipe, cash withdrawal, cross-chain, traditional encryption exchange has done nothing for five years, and Stripe used one year to get the whole warehouse through。

What is more critical is the ability to distribute. Stripe now covers more than 16,000 platforms and 11 million businesses worldwide. When you collect a Ghanaian stabilization currency payment in Shopivy, pay riders in DoorDash, and subscribe in Substack, it's a Stripe pipeline behind you。

The encryption fundamentalists would say, "It's not really encryption, it's central. " But the market doesn ' t care. The market only cares about one thing:Money goes in and out faster, cheaper and less friction。

Patrick was asked last year at the AMA if Stripe would give himself a stable coin, and his answer was interesting: "We're not going to send it, our goal is to catalyze its adoption.".

Agent Economy: Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, joined up to make "AI Pay" TCP/IP

This session is the other thing that really lets me breathe。

it's called  Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)I don't know。

This was actually preheated on March 18, when Stripe and Paradigm hatched the L1 block chain Tempo main line to synchronize the MPP protocol. But then most people, including me, thought it was another encryption project for "System 402. "。

Wrong。

On the scene of the proceedings, Stripe put MPP into a bigger story:General SecretariatI don't know。

Here's the story:

• Your Internet store can now be "seen by AI anent." Dealer uploads product catalogues at Stripe Dashboard, authorizing access. The bottom line is the Open Source Agreement for Common Governance, jointly issued by ACP, Stripe and OpenAI in September 2025. Sam's on board this session, essentially to the ACP platform。
• Stripe and Meta work together so that goods in Facebook advertising can be placed directly by AI。
• Stripe and Google work together to connect AI Mode and Gemini to Universal Common Protocol (UCP)。
• Link introduces ant walklet, you can authorize AI angent to pay with your Link wallet, but retain approval and visibility。
• MPP allows angent to make micropayments, subscribe to payments, even current payments, stable and French currency。

Watch a delicate pattern:Stripe also holds two angent commercial agreements, works with OpenAI on ACP, works with Tempo + Visa + Mastercard on MPPI don't know。

The former is the application layer ( "Agent how to line up in ChatGPT") and the latter is the payment layer ( "Agent how to settle on chains, cards, wallets"). Google's got another UCP, Coinbase alone, x 402, but Stripe's the only oneStandard cooperation with OpenAI, Visa/Mastercard and GoogleThe company。

That's why Sam wants to come personally。

Connect these dots:When you get ChatGPT to book you a ticket, Claude to buy you a gift, someone to manage your SaaS subscription, the money running through Stripe。

And Stripe's smartest trick this time is not to close the door to do it. MPP is open source, not related to the bottom payment channel. Visa has extended it to credit card payments, Lightspank has extended it to the Bitcoin Lightning Network, Stripe has extended it to Klarna, Affirm, etc. BNPL。

This "I'm standard-setting, everybody's using" game reminds me of one thing:TCP/IP WAS SO SUCCESSFUL。

Even worse is the MPP design. It has a name called  "sessions."in the original language of  , angent is granted a one-time amount of authority, which can then be paid on a continuous basisIt doesn't have to be chained every timeI don't know。

Does that sound familiar? That's what Lightning Network wanted to do but didn't do. With a pay company's engineering perspective, Stripe made a really run-away product with a chain of trust and speed。

On the day of the sessionTHE MPP PAYMENT CATALOGUE ALREADY CONTAINS OVER 100 INTEGRATED EQUATIONSAlchemy, Dune, Anthropic, Openai, Shopify, DoorDash, Mastercard, Nubank, Revolut, Slagt, Deutsche Bank..

This is a list of partners who allow any encrypted agreement to spit。

Stripe Treasury: "One-stop finance" for the founder of Silicon Valley, quietly turned into a commercial bank

If the first two are gifts to the encryption ring and the AI ring, the third, Stripe Treasury, is a direct attack on traditional banking in Silicon Valley。

This session is about breaking up a commercial bank and selling it:

• DepositsThe Treasury accounts of United States and British enterprises support storage in 15 currencies。
• Payments: Free and immediate internal transfers between US merchants。
• ConsumptionStripe introduces his Mastercard card, 2% cashback。
• Financial management: Treasury balance can earn Stripe credit credits, offset by processing fees。
• FinancingAtlas founders can receive investment funds from investors in SAFE through Treasury, supporting ACH, wire transfers, and currency stabilization。
• Cross-border: The Treasury balance is bottomed by a non-hosting wallet of Privy, which allows immediate cross-border movement to more than 150 countries。
• AI TRANSLATIONAgent-ready financial accounts allow AI angent to check balances, pay bills, issue cards, manage cash flows, with key operations being human-in-the-loop。

Put these together:Stripe has quietly given all the small businesses it uses, and sent out a "Commercial Bank + Investment Bank + Wallet + AI Finance Assistant" family bucket set。

and the key detail behind this is  Privy's non-host walletI don't know。

Stripe acquired Privy in 2025, when most people thought it was just a little supplement to an encrypted wallet. But now you see:Treasury is the bottom seat of 150 countries around the world, all provided by the non-hosting wallet structure of Privy。

This means that the most valuable thing in traditional banks, the "account," was redefined by Stripe with a stable currency and a non-trust wallet。

The moment a Nigerian developer registered his account on Stripe, he actually got a Privy wallet. This wallet is either a stable currency or a French currency, which is linked to Bridge's cross-border liquidation and Morpho's DeFi proceeds。

The whole process, he doesn't need to know the word "block chain"。

Stripe's AI Two Narratives: Infrastructure for the merchants, Model for themselves

This session is an easy one to underestimate: Stripe is rewriteting himself with AI。

"Payments Foundation Model" was launched last year by Stripe, based on the payment base model of hundreds of billions of trade trainings. This upgraded version is said to have increased the detection rate on fraud by 64 per cent。

And this new release, Stripe Console, is an implementation environment embedded directly in Dashboard, and you ask in natural language, "Why my conversion rate dropped last Tuesday," and it gives you a cross-product diagnosis; you tell it, "A reminder to all customers who haven't paid for the past 30 days," and it's executed, and you are asked to confirm it before major operations。

Custodial objects allow you to model your business data in Stripe and call it like a database。

Stripe Database gives you a single-key, real-time-synchronized Postgress-only database, which is sold by the data company for a single year of subscription。

WorkFlows Now GA, supports loops, third-party actions, Connect platforms。

Put these together:Stripe is moving from an SDK company to an "AI-native operating system"。& nbsp; Businesses do not just collect money on Stripe, but start a company on Stripe, hire anent, run a business, make decisions。

Why is this important to the encryption industry

As it turns out here, many readers may ask, "What does that have to do with encryption?"

My own judgment is:Stripe Sessions 2026 is a watershed moment for stabilizing coins and anent economies。

Over the past five years, the encryption ring has repeatedly told the story that the stability coin is the "killer application" of Web3. For five years, the chain-stabilized currency flows did grow alarmingly, but the vast majority of transactions were still going around between CEX, between traders and arbitragers。REAL C-END BUSINESS, B2B CROSS-BORDER PAYMENT SCENE, ALMOST NO ACCESS。

Why? Because of the threshold, KYC, wallets, private keys, Gas, access money, compliance, any link can discourage a business company。

What Stripe did this timeHide all these thresholds behind the SaaS experience it's provenI don't know。

Businessers click on Stripe Dashboard to "enable stable currency payments" to collect USDC, USDG, USDB; Developers add a parameter to PaymentIntents API, so that AI angent can pay with the MPP protocol; Startup companies register an American company in Stripe Atlas, and get a global bank account with a stable currency endorsement。

No notes, no Gas, no chain ID。  users are simply using a more smooth financial service than traditional banks。

But..

Each stable currency transaction did run on Tempo, Solana, Stellar, Base, Etheum; Every ant payment did run past the MPP protocol; Every Treasury account did go under the non-hosting wallet of Privy。

The chain didn't disappear, it just became a pipe。

This is the future that encryption fundamentalists have been most reluctant to accept in the past five years, but the market will come true sooner or laterOrdinary users do not use block chains because they love to go to centre, and they do not notice using block chains because they experience them better。

One last word

After this session, the strongest feeling is not that "Stripe's good again," but that the encryption industry has been halfway through it, but the industry may not realize it。

Bridge, Privy, Tempo, MPP, these four names have been absorbed, hatched and integrated by the Stripe system one after another in the last 18 months. Each one of them is a star project that encrypts the tracks. But on this map of Stripe, they're just four parts。

And Stripe himself? Its valuation has risen from $91.5 billion in February 2025 to $159.0 billion in February 2026, an increase of 70 per cent a year。

Last year's Sessions, Patrick Collison called "gal force tailwinds", hurricane class. A year later, the wind didn't get any smaller, but it turned Stripe himself into an eye。

What really deserves the attention of the encryption industry is that when 90% of the stable currency and the economy are running through Stripe's pipeline, the central narrative is still in the encryption industry's hands

And the next time someone puts "crypto is for real now" on X, remember: it's not a real deal, it's a payment company called Stripe。

Patrick said last year:"We don't issue stabilization coins, we catalyse the adoption of stabilization coins."

He didn't say the second sentence:WE DON'T DO AI APPLICATIONS, WE CATALYSE THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF ALL AI APPLICATIONS。

Another good thing about catalysts is that when the reaction ends, the credit list on the table does not often write its name。

But Sam knew, Patrick knew, and the encryption industry should know。