Jeff Weinstein@jeff_weinstein
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-commer…) and sign up for our machine payments private preview: docs.stripe.com/payments/machi….
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.)
