Stripe: "In the era of AI agents, blockchains must handle 1 billion transactions per second"

Global fintech company Stripe said it expects that, to prepare for the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, blockchains will need to be able to process up to 1 billion transactions per second.

According to Cointelegraph on the 25th (local time), Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison and co-founder John Collison said in their annual letter that AI agents are likely to become principal actors in internet transactions in the future. “Agents will handle most internet transactions,” they said, adding that “blockchains that support 1 million transactions per second—and even more than 1 billion—may be needed.”

Stripe noted that current blockchain infrastructure is insufficient to meet such demand. The Collison brothers said that “last year, a memecoin trading frenzy on a major blockchain delayed settlement for a single Bridge user by more than 12 hours, and transaction fees surged as much as 35-fold,” adding that “if transaction demand grows further, these problems will become even more severe.”

According to Chainspect data, the only blockchains currently processing more than 1,000 transactions per second are Internet Computer (ICP) and Solana (SOL). The theoretical maximum throughput of the two networks is about 209,708 TPS and 65,000 TPS, respectively—far short of the 1 billion TPS cited by Stripe.

Stripe assessed that AI commerce has already moved beyond the “hype stage” and entered a phase of real-world buildout and experimentation. It categorized AI agent capabilities into five stages: ▲automatic web-form completion ▲context-based search ▲remembering user information (persistence) ▲delegating tasks ▲predicting and making suggestions.

The Collison brothers stressed that “the success of agent commerce depends on universal interoperability,” adding that “it must run on open protocols like the early internet.”