Stripe’s 2025 annual letter

Bullish:

• $STRIPE - Stripe showing exceptional growth with $1.9T volume (up 34%), serving 5M businesses including 90% of Dow Jones companies, and remaining robustly profitable while investing heavily in AI and global payment infrastructure.

  • “Last year, businesses running on Stripe generated 1,900,000,000,000.0 in total volume, up 34% from 2024, an equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP.”

    Host·0:16

  • “Our programmable financial services now power more than 5,000,000 businesses directly or via platforms, including all the top AI companies, many of the largest blue chip companies, 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, most of the biggest tech companies, 80% of the Nasdaq 100”

    Host·0:27

  • “Stripe remained robustly profitable in 2025, allowing us to continue investing heavily in product development with over 350 product updates over the last year as well as acquisitions.”

    Host·1:07
• $STABLES - Stablecoins experiencing massive growth with volume doubling to $400B despite crypto winter, driven by real-world B2B payments adoption and improved infrastructure for global payments.

  • “It may be a crypto winter, but it's a stablecoin summer. After a decade of stablecoin volumes tracking the undulations of the crypto asset prices, last year saw a clear divergence.”

    Host·8:58

  • “In 2025, the price of Bitcoin dropped precipitously and is now 50% down from October, but stablecoin payments volume doubled to around 400,000,000,000, 60% of which is estimated to represent b two b payments.”

    Host·9:07

  • “Bridge, the stablecoin orchestration platform we acquired, saw volume more than quadruple.”

    Host·9:20

  • “Stablecoin payments are marching quietly and inexorably forward as real world uptake continues apace.”

    Host·9:25
• $INFRA - Infrastructure and data center investment driving nearly half of all US GDP growth in 2025 and likely to become majority of growth soon, indicating massive capital allocation to this sector.

  • “Economy wide, demand for software, computers, and data center investment drove nearly half of all US GDP growth in 2025 and will likely soon be a majority of all US growth.”

    Host·3:28
• $AIMODELS - AI companies showing exceptional growth with new businesses reaching $10M ARR within 3 months doubling from previous year, and AI driving massive acceleration in entrepreneurship and code production.

  • “The number of companies reaching 10,000,000 in ARR within three months of launch was double that of the 2024 cohort.”

    Host·4:06

  • “our best guess is that the 2025 acceleration is the start of a larger inflection in entrepreneurship and creativity facilitated by advances in large language models.”

    Host·5:27

  • “Pushes to GitHub, which grew roughly 10 to 12% in prior years, jumped 41% between q three twenty four and q three twenty five.”

    Host·4:29

Bearish:

• $RETAIL - Brick and mortar retail severely underperforming with only 5% growth over three years versus 30% for ecommerce, showing clear structural decline in physical retail.

  • “In retail, for example, US brick and mortar sales grew just 5% over the past three years, whereas ecommerce sales grew 30% over the same period, both of those in inflation adjusted terms.”

    Host·2:44
• $BTC - Bitcoin experiencing significant decline, down 50% from October highs while stablecoins diverge and grow, suggesting Bitcoin losing relevance for payments.

  • “In 2025, the price of Bitcoin dropped precipitously and is now 50% down from October”

    Host·9:07