Stripe

Adaptive Pricing is now available for subscriptions, letting businesses automatically localize prices in over 150 countries while Stripe handles currency conversion. In an A/B test across 1.5 million subscription checkouts, businesses saw 4.7% higher conversion: https://lnkd.in/gye_63AD.

AI agents are not going to replace software engineers yet, at least not when building Stripe integrations. The critical gap between our AI reality today and production-ready reality: we sorely lack a stable and realistic validation layer, especially when it comes to financial infrastructure where we require 100% accuracy. So to measure how AI is progressing on that last mile of value, Kevin Ho and I built a set of robust, replicable software engineering environments to benchmark models on their ability to build complete Stripe integrations. They mirror realistic integration scenarios: huge codebases, data migrations, breaking version changes, server and client-side API integrations, and even browser use. The range of results were extremely surprising, and even more exciting is how we now have an experimentation test bed to demonstrably improve how models integrate with Stripe. We’ve open-sourced the full benchmark suite in our AI toolkit: https://lnkd.in/em-aEwMF. Read the blog post: https://lnkd.in/eXAVSHRq.

We’re launching the Machine Payments Protocol, an open standard, internet-native way for agents to pay, alongside Tempo. With a few lines of code, businesses can now accept payments directly from agents in both stablecoins and fiat. https://lnkd.in/gB-mA3e2

"Well, the only thing we can do right now out of the entire range of possibilities is we got to sue the government. And at the beginning it was like, 'this is crazy.' And we went to the board, and the response was basically—it's an anti-pattern, it's a bad idea, but a lot of great companies are built by an anti-pattern." Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara are the co-founders of Kalshi, the first federally regulated prediction market in the US. They sit down with John Collison and Matt Huang to discuss growing their revenue 11x in six months, why they sued their own regulator to list election markets, and how they are building the "New York Stock Exchange of events." They cover why prediction markets are an antidote to social media polarization, the mechanics of market making for culture, and their vision for trading everything from GPU shipments to the Oscars and the weather. YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g4ivqaw3 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gjaes33U Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gbfYNCDp Full transcript on Substack: https://lnkd.in/g6u9x5_U

Everyone’s talking about the K-shaped economy—the rich pulling away while everyone else stagnates. In our inaugural Stripe Economics post, I take a look at Stripe + macro data, and I see the K on Wall Street, but not yet on Main Street: • The most profitable third of US public companies now account for ~2/3 of total market cap—the highest on record. • The S&P 500 rose 16.5% in 2025, and the top 1% own ~40% of all equities. So unsurprisingly the top 1% wealth share has risen (~2pp) since 2022. • BUT, Stripe data suggest lower-income household spending has been growing faster than high-income households over the last few years. • Wages tell a similar story: real earnings at the 10th percentile grew ~0.5pp slower than the 90th since 2022, but BOTH posted positive real wage growth. • Why? 1) The wealthy hold lots of equities but only account for ~25% of consumer spending. 2) Real wages at the bottom have been supported by continued labor market tightness post-pandemic, though this may cool. Read the full post below and subscribe! https://lnkd.in/esmJh3Br

A future where we buy with AI agents feels inevitable. Making it actually work is harder. These lessons from the first wave of agentic commerce are meant to help sellers decide what to tackle, avoid common bottlenecks, and get ahead of what’s coming: https://lnkd.in/gVUt9jt5.