Stripe's Henri Stern says Privy wallets now move $25 billion a month

Henri Stern, chief executive of Privy, the wallet company Stripe bought in 2025, says crypto wallets are becoming standard parts of financial apps and that AI agents are about to become a large class of their users.

He makes the case as stablecoins worth $303.1 billion circulated across blockchains on Oct. 16, 2026, according to DefiLlama.

Stern set out his view in an interview with BeInCrypto's BeInFinance channel at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, published Oct. 13. Stripe put him in charge of its crypto and stablecoin strategy this month, and he remains Privy's chief executive, Crypto Briefing reported on Oct. 5.

Dollars on-chain, agents at the edge

The market Stern sells into is large in dollars and young in agents. Stablecoin supply rose 0.74% over 30 days, by DefiLlama's data, so growth now depends on putting the same dollars into more products.

Agents already pay, in small amounts. AI agents have made more than 138 million payments over the x402 protocol, more than 87% of them between $0.0001 and $0.10, Chainalysis data reported by Blockhead show.

Card networks are building for the same users. Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines on June 10, a service for payments between AI agents and machines, the company said.

The Federal Reserve calls the shift early. "Market participants broadly agree that agentic commerce is in an early phase," Governor Christopher Waller said on Sept. 29, in a speech at Sibos.

Wallets as plumbing

Stern's first point is scale.

"Today we serve on the order of 3,000 teams moving upwards of $25 billion a month," Stern said.

Those are company-reported figures. He named Robinhood, Kraken and Ramp among Privy's customers.

His pitch is that users never see the wallet as a separate product. "This is wallet infrastructure that you can build into your product directly," he said.

The customer mix is changing too. He said about 40% of recent Privy sign-ups have come from teams building wallet platforms of their own.

The check: the customer count has roughly tripled. When Stripe agreed to buy Privy on June 11, 2025, Privy said it powered more than 75 million accounts across more than 1,000 developer teams, in its announcement.

Going from about 1,000 teams to about 3,000 in 16 months is close to a tripling, our calculation from the two company figures shows.

What can a stablecoin account do?

Stern described accounts that hold dollars, pay out and spend like a bank card. Describing a customer that pays contractors, he said: "Now they're live in more than 80 countries where contractors can get paid out."

Apps can also share yield with users, "enabling them to earn you know call it 3% on top of the balances they hold in app," Stern said. Users can then "spend directly from it anywhere Visa or Mastercard are accepted," he said.

He also pointed to zones on Tempo, the payments blockchain Stripe announced in 2025, which he described as a privacy layer on top of the rail. Stripe and Circle each announced payments-focused blockchains that year, The Defiant reported.

The check: yield is the most contested part of this model in Washington. The Senate's crypto market-structure bill stalled in September partly over stablecoin yield, which critics said could pull deposits from banks, law firm Orrick wrote on Oct. 2.

Agents get wallets, with limits

Stern's third point is agents. The opportunity, he said, depends on "the extent to which we're able to set up stablecoin rails as a great sort of friction saver for the agent."

He wants the limits written in by developers before an agent touches money.

"I want my agent to spend, you know, up to call it $1,000 a day, but no more," Stern said.

In his view, "you would want to set up guard rails when you as the developer set up the agentic controls."

He described a test game in which AI agents held funds, set up so that "the game could run fully autonomously until one agent won and the others ran out of money."

The check: agent payments are still tiny. Most x402 payments were under 10 cents, according to Chainalysis, so a $1,000 daily cap is far above what agents spend today.

By the numbers

The other side: liability and card rails

The Fed sees trust as the harder problem. "Who is on the hook if an agent makes the wrong purchase?" Waller asked in the same speech.

He drew a line between agent-assisted commerce, where the buyer stays in control and pays, and agent-delegated commerce, where the agent shops and pays alone. The second, Waller said, needs far more trust mechanisms and guardrails.

Card networks are also competing for agent payments, and Stern's own stablecoin accounts rely on Visa and Mastercard acceptance for spending. Privy's team and volume figures are company-reported, and we found no independent count.

The Senate vote also leaves yield-sharing accounts without a federal law behind them. The bill failed 49-50 on Sept. 15, short of the 60 votes needed, Orrick wrote.

What to watch: Stripe's crypto lineup under Stern

The first signal is products. New stablecoin accounts, cards and agent tools from Stripe under Stern's remit will show how fast wallets move from crypto apps into mainstream finance.

The second is Washington. A motion to reconsider keeps a path open to revive the CLARITY Act, Orrick wrote, but the midterm calendar makes passage this Congress unlikely.

The third is agent dollars. Rising dollar totals through x402 and card-network agent services, not only payment counts, would show agents moving real money.

What we do not know is how much of Privy's $25 billion a month comes from payments rather than trading by exchange customers.

How we reported this: Stern's remarks come from his interview with BeInCrypto's BeInFinance channel at TOKEN2049 Singapore, published Oct. 13, 2026, checked against the video's auto-generated captions. Stablecoin data come from DefiLlama as of Oct. 16; agent payments from Chainalysis as reported by Blockhead; Waller's remarks from the Federal Reserve website. The tripling is our calculation: about 3,000 teams / about 1,000. Privy's figures are company-reported.