So far, machine payments have mostly been about businesses accepting stablecoins. And stablecoins are great (cross-border, low cost, etc.)!
But much of the planet is holding a card. 🤖 💳 🌎
Here’s a 📺 sneak peek demo from
@stevekaliski of how a business can programmatically accept cards via agents.
As an example: Stripe Climate is a way to contribute to carbon removal funding. Stripe Climate implemented the Machine Payments Protocol using the Stripe API, so agents can make micropayment donations (
climate.stripe.dev). In addition to accepting stablecoin (specifically usdc on
@tempo), agents can now pay with fiat methods, namely cards and
@link (and soon buy-now-pay-laters) via Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs), using the same
@mpp integration.
Human buyers, their agents, and businesses each have their own preferred methods of payment. Humans often already have a card. Agents may prefer stablecoins. Businesses tend to want to accept any form of payment, as long as it is high conversion, low fraud, and properly priced. For microtransactions, stablecoins are a low-cost way (no fixed card fee) to transact. But if you want to tell your agent to donate $100 on your behalf, a card may be the preferred solution.
If you’re a business and want to accept machine payments, whether over stablecoins, cards, Link, or other future methods, read about Shared Payment Tokens (
docs.stripe.com/agentic-comm…) and sign up for our machine payments private preview:
docs.stripe.com/payments/mac….
And stay tuned: more to make it easy for consumers, agents, and businesses to transact, shipping over the next few weeks. (And excuse the acronyms and specifics terms, there's a lot of new infrastructure and primitives being built to support agentic commerce.)