Stripe Spends Billions on OpenRouter

Stripe has reportedly agreed to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, according to Bloomberg. The deal would put one of the largest marketplaces for AI inference inside a company that owns a stablecoin issuer, a wallet provider, and a co-authored protocol for machines to pay each other onchain.

OpenRouter bills through a prepaid credit balance held on its own books, and charges less to top up this balance in crypto than in card payments processed by Stripe. It takes no markup on inference, charging only a small fee when purchasing credits, which is 5% with an $0.80 minimum on purchases through Stripe, and 5% on crypto.

Tempo, the payments chain co-authored by Stripe, recorded 80,388 transactions over 24 hours, or slightly under one per second. Chain fees totaled $5.34 over 24 hours, $38.27 over seven days, and $620.09 over 30 days.