December 12 may become a watershed moment in the history of crypto payments.

Global payment giant Stripe suddenly announced: a full rollout of stablecoin payment channels. USDC can now be directly settled on the Ethereum, Base, and Polygon networks. What's even more crucial—all merchants integrated with Stripe can support this system without changing a single line of code.

Shopify online stores, some Amazon services, even OpenAI subscription payments—in theory, all can now be completed using on-chain assets. This isn’t a tech demo; it’s a real option being offered directly to tens of millions of merchants.

To be honest, the impact of Stripe’s move has been underestimated.

Keep in mind, this company is valued at nearly $60 billion and acts as a kind of “Visa + PayPal + banking clearing network” in the Web2 world. When a player of this scale decides to embed stablecoins into its core business flows, the signal isn’t “we’re testing the waters” anymore—it’s “traditional payments need to step aside.”

Internally, they’ve already seen through a key issue: cross-border transfers are painfully slow, fees are outrageously high, and there are so many intermediaries it makes you question the entire process. But stablecoins? Instant settlement, near-zero costs, globally accessible.

So instead of waiting for regulators to gradually relax, they’re redefining payment standards through direct action. As a Stripe executive previously put it bluntly: “Most blockchain applications are fake needs, but stablecoins and cross-border settlements are the exceptions.” Clearly, they’re genuinely betting on this logic for the future.

A Web2 giant personally backing on-chain payments—how will this play out? It’s worth keeping a close eye on.