Payments

Stripe won the merchants. Now it needs the shoppers.

Stripe and Advent bid $53 billion for PayPal. The real target is 440 million consumer accounts, arriving just as AI agents begin doing the buying for people.

The AI web just got a toll booth, and Cloudflare owns it

Cloudflare's new Monetization Gateway lets sites charge AI agents per request. The mechanism might finally solve micropayments, but the same old question follows: who ends up owning the meter.

The fintech engineering rules that actually hold

A fintech engineering handbook is making the rounds, and the debate around it is more instructive than the document itself: three principles survive every context, and organizations still break them anyway.