Every Correspondent Bank Will Support Stablecoins

Stripe's leaked investor letter confirmed all kinds of details about the company, as well as its acquisition of OpenRouter, which Axios reports is for over $8 billion.

For those of you that don't know, OpenRouter is one single API that lets clients access over 400 different APIs.

and potentially route tasks to a cheaper AI model if the frontier labs are getting a bit expensive.

Stripe also mentioned that their first half revenue rose 41% year over year.

Free cash flow rose 43%.

And of course, their last year payment volume was $1.9 trillion.

Absolutely massive.

And this is following Stripe being valued at more than $159 billion in February.

And they're alleged to also be putting an offer together for PayPal alongside private equity firms.

Absolutely massive.

The Stripe boys say the singularity has begun and they are benefiting from that tailwind.

Ferdy, what do you think about when you see this scale of news coming from a company the size of Stripe?

Yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, when I first heard about the rumors, I actually thought it was a bit far off for them to do the acquisition because it's a non-trivial acquisition.

It's like five percentage points of dilution for them.

But I do think it's impressive with how much conviction they're kind of like leaning into this AI thing, right? I think you really have got to hand it to Collison Brothers.

It's one of these... things where you just notice it's a founder-led business through the kind of like conviction and size of the bets that they can take, which outside in seem far off from the core business.

But I think they've understood the singularity has begun and they're executing accordingly, right?

Yeah, I saw a wild stat floating by Kai on X, which was striped today through its metronome business that they also acquired for about a billion dollars.

It's doing most of the billing for tokens, and that billing gives them about a 2.5% take rate on AI tokens that have been sold.

But if you think about what OpenRouter does... is it routes you to a different model that might be lower cost, but it's taking a 5% markup over the inference.

So if you put the inference together with the 2.5%, 5% plus 2.5%, they've now got a 7.5% take rate on the AI economy.

And I thought that was a fascinating idea.

But Kai, what are your thoughts on this story?

So many thoughts.

Stripe's leaked investor letter confirmed all kinds of details about the company, as well as its acquisition of OpenRouter, which Axios reports is for over $8 billion.

For those of you that don't know, OpenRouter is one single API that lets clients access over 400 different APIs.

and potentially route tasks to a cheaper AI model if the frontier labs are getting a bit expensive.

Stripe also mentioned that their first half revenue rose 41% year over year.

Free cash flow rose 43%.

And of course, their last year payment volume was $1.9 trillion.

Absolutely massive.

And this is following Stripe being valued at more than $159 billion in February.

And they're alleged to also be putting an offer together for PayPal alongside private equity firms.

Absolutely massive.

The Stripe boys say the singularity has begun and they are benefiting from that tailwind.

Ferdy, what do you think about when you see this scale of news coming from a company the size of Stripe?

Yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, when I first heard about the rumors, I actually thought it was a bit far off for them to do the acquisition because it's a non-trivial acquisition.

It's like five percentage points of dilution for them.

But I do think it's impressive with how much conviction they're kind of like leaning into this AI thing, right? I think you really have got to hand it to Collison Brothers.

It's one of these... things where you just notice it's a founder-led business through the kind of like conviction and size of the bets that they can take, which outside in seem far off from the core business.

But I think they've understood the singularity has begun and they're executing accordingly, right?

Yeah, I saw a wild stat floating by Kai on X, which was striped today through its metronome business that they also acquired for about a billion dollars.

It's doing most of the billing for tokens, and that billing gives them about a 2.5% take rate on AI tokens that have been sold.

But if you think about what OpenRouter does... is it routes you to a different model that might be lower cost, but it's taking a 5% markup over the inference.

So if you put the inference together with the 2.5%, 5% plus 2.5%, they've now got a 7.5% take rate on the AI economy.

And I thought that was a fascinating idea.

But Kai, what are your thoughts on this story?

So many thoughts.