The payments wars used to be simple. Stripe vs. PayPal. Square vs. traditional POS. But something fundamental has shifted in 2026, and most founders are missing it.
The real competition now is not about who processes your credit card swipe. It is about who becomes the coordination layer for all economic activity between humans, businesses, and AI agents.
The New Battlefield: Agentic Commerce
In December 2025, Stripe launched the Agentic Commerce Suite alongside the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open standard for AI agents to transact with businesses. Just weeks later at NRF 2026, Google fired back with the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), backed by Shopify, Walmart, Target, and Visa.
This is not incremental product iteration. This is a land grab for something much bigger: the right to coordinate how value moves in an AI-native economy.
Think about what these protocols actually do. When you ask ChatGPT to buy running shoes, or Gemini to book a flight, someone needs to handle discovery (which products exist), negotiation (pricing and availability), trust (payment security), and fulfillment (order routing). The company that owns this coordination layer does not just process payments. They become the economic operating system.
Who Is Building What
Stripe is betting on developer-first infrastructure. Their Agentic Commerce Suite lets businesses connect product catalogs, handle checkout, and accept "Shared Payment Tokens" from AI agents. Major brands like URBN, Etsy, and Coach are already onboard. They also acquired Bridge and Privy to embed stablecoins and crypto infrastructure into their stack. Stripe is now valued at $140B and still not going public.
Google is playing the distribution game. UCP integrates with their existing Merchant Center, Search, and the Gemini app. They launched "Business Agent" which lets shoppers chat with brands directly in Search results. For retailers already in the Google ecosystem, it is plug-and-play. Stripe notably endorsed UCP, signaling they will support both protocols.
Microsoft is moving through Copilot. They announced Copilot Checkout, powered by Stripe, letting users buy from Etsy and URBN retailers without leaving the chat. OpenAI already has Instant Checkout in ChatGPT using Stripe's ACP.
PayPal and Apple are notably quieter here. PayPal is moving toward Google Pay integration in UCP, and Apple has their usual walled-garden approach with Apple Pay. But neither has launched their own agentic commerce protocol.
Why This Matters for Indie Founders
Here is the thing: economic coordination layers historically extracted enormous value from participants. Visa and Mastercard take 2-3% of every transaction. App stores take 30%. The companies building these new rails will decide who gets discovered, how payments flow, and what the economics look like.
For indie hackers and bootstrapped founders, this creates both opportunity and risk.
The opportunity: If you sell digital products or SaaS, these new protocols could dramatically expand your reach. An AI agent could recommend your product to millions of users based on their specific needs, bypassing traditional marketing entirely. The "discovery problem" that kills most indie products might actually get easier.
The risk: You could get locked into a single ecosystem. If Stripe's ACP wins and you are only set up for that, you miss Google's distribution. If UCP dominates Search but you bet on OpenAI, you lose discoverability. Platform dependence becomes protocol dependence.
Where MoRs Fit In
Merchant of Record (MoR) services like CREEM become even more valuable in this landscape. Here is why.
When Stripe's blog talks about businesses being "the merchant of record" in agentic commerce, they mean handling taxes, compliance, refunds, and disputes. For enterprise retailers with legal teams, that is manageable. For a solo founder selling a $29 SaaS tool globally, it is a nightmare.
An MoR abstracts that complexity. We handle the tax calculations in 150+ countries. We deal with VAT compliance in Europe. We manage the refund workflows. You focus on building products.
As agentic commerce scales, the compliance surface area explodes. AI agents do not care about tax jurisdictions. They just want to complete transactions. Someone has to handle the messy middle layer between "customer wants to buy" and "money lands in your account, legally."
That is exactly what MoRs do.
The Indie-Friendly Stack
If you are building in 2026, here is what this means practically:
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Stay protocol-agnostic where possible. Both ACP and UCP are open standards. Position your products to work with either.
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Use an MoR for global sales. When AI agents start driving purchases from 50 countries simultaneously, you do not want to figure out tax compliance on the fly.
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Structure your product data for AI. The retailers winning at agentic commerce are investing in clean, structured catalogs. Your product descriptions, pricing, and availability should be machine-readable.
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Watch the middleware layer. Companies building translation layers between protocols will emerge. Being early to integrate could matter.
The Bottom Line
Economic coordination is being rebuilt from scratch for an AI-native world. The winners will not just process payments. They will own the infrastructure that connects buyers, sellers, and AI agents.
For indie founders, the playbook is clear: stay nimble, use tools that handle complexity for you, and keep your products discoverable by machines as much as humans.
The race is on. Make sure you are building on rails that work for you.
