[Helena Oh] 1 million TPS: The internet of money for the AI era

Stablecoins can no longer be explained solely in the language of speculative assets. What matters now is not price, but infrastructure.

Stripe, a global provider of online payments and financial software that has become one of the core payment networks powering e-commerce, noted in its 2025 annual letter that stablecoin payments are rapidly emerging as a practical means of settlement. According to Stripe, stablecoin payment volume nearly doubled last year to about $400 billion, with roughly 60 percent estimated to be business-to-business transactions. The transaction volume of Bridge, the stablecoin orchestration platform it acquired, also increased more than fourfold.

But the more important point lies elsewhere. Stripe argued that most blockchains today have been designed primarily around trading and decentralized finance, while key payment requirements — throughput, reliability, cost predictability and privacy — have not been sufficiently prioritized. Bitcoin processes fewer than 10 transactions per second, and on one major blockchain network, meme-coin speculation once caused payment delays of more than 12 hours while transaction fees surged by as much as 35 times.

Looking ahead, Stripe suggests that AI agents could soon be executing a significant share of internet transactions. In such a world, blockchains capable of handling one million transactions per second — and potentially even billions — may be required. This is hardly an exaggeration. Payment systems designed for humans clicking a few buttons cannot sustain an economy in which AI agents search, negotiate and execute purchases in real time.

The real competition, therefore, is no longer about which coin will rise in price. It is about which network will emerge as the industrial-grade payment infrastructure of the digital economy.

For South Korea, the debate must now move beyond the simple question of whether stablecoins should be allowed. The more important issue is what kind of “internet of money” the country intends to build — on what level of network performance and under what regulatory and governance framework.

In the AI era, leadership will not be determined solely by technologies that process information. Ultimately, the decisive factor will be the payment infrastructure that turns that information into transactions.

Helena Oh

Helena Oh (Eun Jung Oh) is the CEO of TokenSquare. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.