It has taken two weeks, but I’m finally 20% through processing Stripe Sessions 2026 (my first). I’ll say it plainly: I was absolutely blown away by the energy, the talent, the ambition, and frankly, the sheer scale of what Stripe is building. My only real complaint? The rooms needed to be bigger. A lot bigger.
288 Product Announcements. Let That Sink In.
288 new products and features launched at a single event! That’s not a product roadmap — that’s a platform transformation. And it wasn’t noise; it was depth. Every team I spoke to had something real to show, and the through-line across nearly all of it was clear: Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for the AI era.
I’ve been in payments and platform businesses for a long time (I’m ex-Oracle), and my mantra has been that you can measure the health of a platform by the strength of its developer community. By that measure, Stripe may have the best developer community of any platform in history. That’s not hyperbole — it’s what I saw. Builders who are deeply invested, vocal about what they need, and actively shaping what gets productized. The merchant side of payments is the engine room, and Stripe listens to everything happening in there.
A Word of Gratitude
I want to specifically thank Stripe’s senior product leaders who took time for 1:1 conversations. Beyond the keynotes and demos, those conversations gave me a window into how Stripe thinks. I came away beyond impressed with the talent across the organization. These are people who have deeply internalized both the technical complexity of payments and the strategic stakes of what they’re building.
On Stablecoins: Nuance Where Others Have Noise
One of the most important things I took away from Sessions was Stripe’s crystal-clear view on stablecoins and cards. Their product team was direct: they do not see stablecoins as a threat to card networks. While they may have been purposed to tell me what I was hoping to hear, I dont think so because it had real depth behind it.
My biggest learning came from a Tempo 1:1 discussion ( Stripe’s blockchain-based settlement network). “Tom, Tempo is the first core infrastructure that we can deploy consistently across Stripe globally.” That’s significant. Today, Stripe’s acceptance platforms differ by market — a necessary reality given local licenses, partnerships, payfac structures, and clearing-and-settlement dependencies. Tempo solves that internal fragmentation. It enables Stripe internally as much as it enables new products like MPP externally.
Think of Tempo as a potential hub in a payments “network of networks.” That framing is intentional and important. Stablecoins aren’t replacing cards here — they’re filling the spaces where cards structurally can’t go and enabling stripe to build consistently internally (powering faster and more consistent product deployments globally). The card networks bring economics, governance, trust, fraud infrastructure, dispute resolution, and global acceptance. Stablecoins bring programmability, speed, and cross-border efficiency across markets and products as well as in UCs the card rails were never built for.
MPP: My Personal Highlight
I’ve written before about why I’m so excited about the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) — MPP and x402: Solving the Internet’s Original Sin and Sessions 2026 only deepened that conviction.
The growth in MPP adoption is geometric, not linear. And one of the best developments I heard at Sessions? The two “competing” x402 leaders have come together. When protocol leaders consolidate around a shared standard, that’s usually the moment a new infrastructure layer starts to scale. We’re at that inflection point.
MPP enables agents to transact programmatically — microtransactions, recurring payments, stablecoin settlement — without human intervention at every step. At Sessions, Stripe confirmed that you can now accept payments from agents over MPP in stablecoins as well as fiat, through cards, Klarna, and Affirm via Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs). That’s the hybrid architecture I’ve been expecting: not “stablecoins vs. cards” but “stablecoins and cards, each where they fit.”
And here’s something worth flagging for the card networks: there’s nothing small about micropayments. Cards can absolutely play in MPP but only if issuers allow Visa and Mastercard to drop the fixed component of interchange. The ad valorem percentage isn’t the problem; it’s the per-transaction floor that makes sub-$1 payments economically unviable on rails designed for a different era. This is a solvable problem. I hope the right people at V/MA are thinking about it.
The Numbers Behind the Momentum
For context: Stripe’s 2025 Annual Letter, published in February, reported that businesses on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total payment volume — up 34% year-over-year, and equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP. That number was already staggering. Sessions 2026 makes clear that Stripe isn’t coasting on that momentum; they’re accelerating through it.
Revenue Suite (Billing, Invoicing, Tax, and more) is on track to hit a $1 billion annual run rate. That’s a mature, diversified platform, not a single-product company. The breadth of what Stripe is building — from AI-native checkout to agentic commerce, from global terminal expansion to stablecoin settlement — reflects a company that has genuinely internalized that payments infrastructure is internet infrastructure.
Final Thought
Stripe Sessions 2026 wasn’t just a product launch event. It was a statement of intent. The company that started by making it easy for developers to accept a card payment online has become the platform on which the internet economy runs, and increasingly, on which the AI economy will run too.
I came in optimistic. I left a true believer. See you all at the next one ( in a bigger room, hopefully).