Industry Timeline

Stripe announced a partnership with Crypto.com enabling merchants on Stripe to accept cryptocurrency payments at checkout. The integration adds crypto as a payment method alongside traditional card payments, marking Stripe's deepest push into crypto commerce beyond stablecoins.

Stripe announced a tender offer valuing the company at $159 billion, with investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue, and a16z providing liquidity to employees. The annual letter revealed $1.9 trillion in total payment volume for 2025, up 34% year-over-year and equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP.

Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm acquired by Stripe for $1.1B, received conditional approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to form a national trust bank. The charter would allow Bridge to issue stablecoins, custody digital assets, and manage reserves under direct federal oversight.

Lemon Squeezy published a 2026 update confirming that public access for Stripe Managed Payments — the new merchant-of-record product built into Stripe — will open soon without invite requirements, allowing Lemon Squeezy users to migrate to Stripe's MoR infrastructure.

Usage-based billing platform Orb launched a rebrand positioning itself as a 'revenue design' company, reflecting how AI-native companies like Replit, Glean, Vercel, and Supabase are moving from seat-based to usage and outcome-based pricing models.

Stripe introduced the Agentic Commerce Suite, enabling businesses to sell through AI agents with a single integration. The suite makes products discoverable to AI agents, simplifies checkout, and accepts agentic payments — part of Stripe's partnership with OpenAI to power shopping inside ChatGPT.

Stripe signed a definitive agreement to acquire usage-based billing platform Metronome for approximately $1 billion. CEO Patrick Collison said metered pricing is 'the native business model for the AI era.' Metronome's clients included OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, and Nvidia.

Paddle shipped BLIK, MB Way, and Pix payment methods, added Korean payments with recurring Kakao Pay and Naver Pay support, and launched an in-dashboard migration tool for moving subscribers from Paddle Classic to Paddle Billing.

At Stripe Tour New York, Stripe announced over 40 launches including Open Issuance for custom stablecoins, recurring stablecoin payments in Optimized Checkout, the Stripe Reader S710 with cellular connectivity, and machine payments for AI agent billing.

Merchant-of-record platform Paddle raised $25M in debt financing from CIBC Innovation Banking to fund global expansion, opened an Austin office, and hired former Shopify executives. The company cited 40% year-over-year growth driven by AI products and Apple's app ecosystem opening to web payments.

As of July 1, 2025, 15 US states including South Dakota and Utah dropped the 200-transaction threshold for sales tax economic nexus, leaving revenue-only thresholds. This simplifies compliance for small sellers but changes the nexus landscape for SaaS companies.

Open-source merchant-of-record platform Polar closed a $10M seed round led by Accel, with angel investors from Vercel, Supabase, Shopify, WorkOS, and Raycast. The funding supports the next generation of billing primitives for developers.

At Stripe Sessions, Stripe unveiled a payments AI foundation model trained on tens of billions of transactions, stablecoin-powered financial accounts, and Stripe Managed Payments — a new merchant-of-record product built from the Lemon Squeezy acquisition.

Dodo Payments closed a $1.1M pre-seed round led by Venture Catalysts, 9Unicorns, and Antler, with angel investors from PayU, Flipkart, and a16z. The merchant-of-record platform was serving 1,000+ merchants across 30+ countries at the time of the raise.