Stripe's letter to investors has been leaked, clearly explaining the intent behind Stripe's aggressive acquisitions (Bridge, Privy, Metronome, Openrouter) in recent times: Combining native stablecoins with the agent economy to build a brand-new set of infrastructure primitives for the AI era. Specifically, the strategic framework behind these acquisitions and product launches includes: - **Discovery + Onboarding**: Stripe Projects (enabling agents to autonomously register for third-party services), Stripe Directory (a discovery feature for products and services used by agents), Provisioning API (providing embedded registration interfaces for agents). - **Usage Management**: Metronome. - **Payment**: Bridge (stablecoin issuance), Stripe's ACS Suite (Agentic Commerce Suite), Tempo (stablecoin public chain), MPP (Machine Payment Protocol). - **Fund Storage**: Privy (user-friendly wallet), Open Standard (a premium stablecoin alliance). As for the acquisition of Openrouter, the grand vision is this: Capital and intelligence are becoming the two major digital flows that support the operations of every business. Openrouter is already the world's largest and most trusted token routing engine. In the future, when combined with the infrastructure built through these previous acquisitions, Openrouter can enable Stripe to help businesses efficiently allocate "intelligent capital," a new form of currency, in the AI era. **Note**: Payment companies used to deal with "money." In the AI era, they want to handle both money and tokens. Stripe says, "Intelligent capital" will be a new form of currency—this will be an extension of financial service capabilities.