Author: Zuoye Waiboshan
Four Generations of the Payment Industry Under One Roof
A storm is brewing on the horizon. Stripe is once again attempting to acquire PayPal. Times have changed. The last time was 30 years ago when Peter Thiel's PayPal merged with Elon Musk's original X.com.
I don't understand why everyone is talking about PayPal's sluggish growth as if the FinTech track is destined to be perilous for us. Twenty years ago, Peter Thiel embarked on his first entrepreneurial journey starting with payments, and the PayPal Mafia was unified. Wherever Musk went, the public welcomed him with utmost sincerity. It truly captured the right timing—a scene of vibrant vitality and fierce competition is still fresh in my mind. How could it be that in just twenty short years, the payments landscape has transformed into a place that buries us?
Growth is a Miracle, Stablecoins Are Not
Stripe not going public during the pandemic was, in hindsight, a mistake.
All of Stripe's efforts are for the elusive dream of an IPO. Against the backdrop of pandemic-era quantitative easing, Stripe first touched a $100B valuation.
However, it did not follow Coinbase and others in going public, leading to a continuous decline in its valuation. Mistaking an era's opportunity for personal effort, Stripe, after painful reflection, embarked on the path of acquisition.
Stripe started with a developer-friendly model, one-click API integration, which was undeniably tempting for developers. This is also the most unique strategy in the payments industry—not obsessing over rates and scenarios, but reaching the people who actually do the work behind them.
Stripe hopes to repeatedly reuse its experience, cutting into acquiring systems from the B-side, stablecoins from the C-side, and even laying out protocols like ACP/MPP for the Agent-side, hoping to reshape the entire payments industry.
Image caption: Stripe's bumpy road to IPO
Image source: @zuoyeweb3
The payments industry always has two characteristics that also hinder Stripe's continued advancement:
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The highly fragmented nature of the payments industry remains unchanged. Securing a country, an industry, or even a few companies can ensure survival, making it difficult to be directly eliminated by external forces.
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Payments are an appendage of the banking industry. Developers and B/C-side enterprises are ultimately externalizations of bank processes, and stablecoins are also eventually incorporated into the banking system.
Especially the series of stablecoin acquisitions—from Bridge's issuance, to Privy's wallet entry point, even Tempo and OpenUSD—find it difficult to replicate Stripe's past glory.
This proposal to acquire PayPal is essentially a staged result of Stripe's failed attempt to crack the C-side with stablecoins, now trying to use PayPal's C-side business to shore up its own weaknesses.
PayPal's problem is not that it can't keep up with the times; from Venmo to PYUSD, nothing has saved PayPal's downward trend.
In other words, PayPal is simply too old. The entire enterprise suffers from structural dysfunction; it can't be revived simply by launching new businesses.
The slightly later-starting Stripe still wants to add more narrative possibilities for itself before its IPO.
If Stripe wraps the backend to capture the developer market, then the stablecoin market wraps the frontend. The story of issuance networks is likely over. Tempo and OpenUSD might impact Circle's stock price, but they won't shake Tether one bit.
If Stripe's ceiling is Coinbase or Circle, then going public is destined for a fate akin to a broken IPO. Compared to Adyen's market cap and Airwallex's valuation, Stripe's stablecoin narrative X Agent narrative is useful.
Stablecoins are not the daily routine of the current payment system, but they are a visible trend.
Agents still need to find an entry point into the current system.
On the positive side of the news, agents are already using stablecoins to frantically buy computing power and tokens. But aside from volume manipulation, agents have still not entered Web3 business, let alone the more conservative corporate and banking systems.
Image caption: Agents are currently mainly used for volume inflation
Image source: @BarkerMoneyX
A-side (future), B-side, C-side, D-side (origin). But Stripe's valuation can hardly escape the reasonable ceiling of FinTech at $50B. $100B contains too much active imagination.
If it cannot briefly reach the future, then expanding scale and ecosystem is the only point Stripe can leverage. You can think of Stripe as a kind of option product.
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Agents will use OUSD stablecoin, running on Tempo, Stripe should be on the scale of Visa;
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Agents will use stablecoins, but OUSD fails, Tempo captures part of the market, Stripe should have a valuation of $100B + Tempo public chain valuation;
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Agent economics are unlikely to materialize, Agentic Payment is superseded by new concepts, then Stripe at least still has its own business.
Investment losses are, of course, a blunder, but missing out will cause lifelong regret. Starting from the difficult problem Stripe poses for the primary market, how the entire payments industry will evolve is also worth our further consideration.
Payment is Just the Entry, Value-Added Services Generate Profit
Agents are a visible future, provided you can survive until that day.
Standing in mid-2026 is a delicate point in time. It's the final window for clear legislation to pass; stablecoin profits might be settled once and for all.
Meanwhile, the long-term future of the Agent economy currently focuses on replacement models for white-collar and blue-collar workers, as well as new wearable devices, AIOS phones, and other hardware fields.
The transformation of payments by Agents has not attracted widespread social attention. There is reason to believe this is a hidden opportunity for stablecoins, a β opportunity delivered by the times.
Image caption: The eternally moving payments industry
Image source: @zuoyeweb3
However, the operational model built on "licensing + localization" by the payments industry in the past may face continuous冲击 (impact/assault) from clearing networks.
Stablecoins still need on-ramps and other entry points on the front end, as well as exit points for on-chain circulation and settlement, which is also the source of the banking industry's compliance confidence.
In the FinTech wave propelled by the internet over the past 30 years, the final outcome has enhanced the banking industry's control over payments. It has not been directly transformed or disappeared like publishing, consumption, entertainment, and餐饮 (dining/food & beverage).
Under the waves of technology, although banks have become increasingly transparent, they始终 (always) control the ultimate touchpoints of cash and physical branch networks. In a sense, the fragmentation of the payments industry can be attributed to the segmented, regional divisions of banks, while licensing and sovereign boundaries are merely acknowledgments of reality.
But within the actions of Stripe and Circle lies another possibility for payments: acquiring customers via front-end stablecoins and generating profits via back-end clearing.
Stripe and Circle are actually quite similar, representing the future intersecting forms of FinTech and Crypto. Both are working on public chains (Tempo vs Arc), stablecoins (OUSD vs USDC), and clearing networks.
The reason it's not about sharing stablecoin issuance revenue is that Circle has already started subsidizing channels like Hyperliquid, and OUSD directly shares profits with partners. Both sides have already started internal competition; this cannot be the future.
But the clearing system, for the first time, allows their public chains to earn the benefits of payment and stablecoin network effects purely through capital efficiency, without强行 (forcefully) subsidizing partners.
The clearing system is not complex. Traditional fiat clearing relies on card networks, SWIFT, central banks, and commercial banks, layer upon layer,早已 (long since)不堪重负 (unable to bear the burden).
Emerging stablecoin public chains, however, have no historical burdens and can focus on提高 (improving) clearing efficiency. And as Circle and Stripe obtain OCC special-purpose bank charters (conditionally approved), after stablecoin profit sharing, they will inevitably move towards clearing.
And clearing networks have the potential to partially脱离 (detach from) the commercial banking system and keep profits within their own hands.
Conclusion
Stripe missed the IPO window during the pandemic and stepped into the trench warfare of third-party payments. This battle is an eternal Verdun model, where you can never crush small players in specific regions and industries through scale alone.
