Stripe expands stablecoin support to recurring payments

Stripe is extending its stablecoin payments offering to cover subscriptions, addressing a growing need among businesses with recurring revenue models. The company says 30% of businesses on its platform—including a majority of AI companies—operate with subscriptions, and many of those firms are already seeing significant demand for crypto-based payments.

The move builds on momentum from Stripe’s stablecoin payments launch a year ago. Cross-border transactions remain a pain point: they are expensive to process, slow to settle, and prone to failure. Stablecoins address those issues with near-instant settlement at roughly half the processing cost per transaction. Among the top 20 AI companies on Stripe—all but one based in the US—60% of revenue comes from outside the country, and some customers like Shadeform report about 20% of their payment volume has shifted to stablecoins.

How recurring crypto payments work

Launching subscriptions on blockchain payments required solving a core limitation: wallet owners normally must manually sign every transaction. Stripe built a smart contract that lets customers save their wallet as a payment method and authorize recurring payments without re-signing each time. The contract works with more than 400 supported wallets, and the setup flow mirrors saving any other payment method on Stripe.

With the new capabilities, businesses can:

  • Accept subscription payments from customer crypto wallets, with settlements made directly in fiat
  • Manage fiat and stablecoin subscriptions together in the Stripe Dashboard
  • Use stablecoin subscriptions with Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite and Stripe Billing
  • Apply stablecoin payments across their broader product offerings

The stablecoin subscription feature is available in private preview for US-based businesses, supporting USDC payments over the Base and Polygon blockchains. Merchants can enable standard stablecoin payments from the payment methods section of the Stripe Dashboard, while subscription capability requires requesting access separately. Stripe cites customer interest in reducing payment-related costs, attracting tech-forward users, and reaching customers without access to traditional payment methods as drivers for the rollout.