Crypto & LLMs
The future of e-commerce is being rewritten in real time.
Last week, Stripe and OpenAI introduced checkout experiences directly inside ChatGPT.
This means you’ll soon be able to purchase items without leaving your LLM chat. And you know what follows: businesses will need to start thinking about LLMO (SEO for LLMs) to stay visible in this new conversion funnel (and eventually budget for it as part of their advertising stack).
But here’s the bigger picture: just a few months ago, Stripe and Shopify announced that buyers could pay with USDC on Coinbase's BASE chain through the new Commerce Payments Protocol.
Do you see where this is going? Crypto wallets like Phantom loaded with USDC on BASE, will soon be able to pay for Shopify items on top of Stripe’s rails — all without ever leaving ChatGPT. It’s no coincidence that Phantom has announced a new stablecoin in partnership with Stripe, the new Phantom CASH, which is probably the first project coming out of Stripe’s Open Issuance program, allowing any company to issue stablecoins.
I don’t want to get deep into the fiat payment experiences, which might get fully integrated with Stripe’s Link. That’s 100% bound to happen and to eat even more into the share of world-wide online payments. This announcement particularly fascinates me because the complexity of paying with crypto will be reduced into a few chat-based commands. So many steps, so many polished experiences… all abstracted into chat-based commerce.
It’s fair to say that crypto was (and still is) trying to find its consumer adoption for e-commerce - it’s still in a very early stage. I can tell that because I’ve been working with crypto payments for 3 years and a half. But as we bend the crypto processes into an easier flow, I believe adoption will come. It won’t come for all projects though, but mostly for stablecoins working within this walled garden between generative AI, Stripe, BASE and Shopify. I’m expecting everything else in crypto to have a very slow death - mass market adoption will remain confined to this closed ecosystem, while interest in other projects slowly declines until they falter.
Still, these payment methods won’t reach mass adoption overnight. But fast-forward 15/20 years (or perhaps much sooner), and it’s entirely possible we’ll buy online without visiting a website or approving payments in third-party apps. Just intent → purchase → done. As companies launch their own interchangeable stablecoins (looking at you PayPal with your PYUSD), it’s probably a question of when, not if, people will be using crypto without actually knowing they’re using crypto to complete payments - and that is the only way crypto will have the mass market adoption the crypto community has ever dreamed of.
It’s also important to note that this new way of payment eliminates websites from the flow. Again, e-commerce websites won’t disappear for sure. But we may start looking at them the way younger generations see roadside billboards: visible, familiar, but rarely where the real action happens.
