Patrick Collison

Instinct and Stripe @link: text your agent to buy things around the internet.

Pretty neat: EURR, a new Euro-backed stablecoin, powered by Bridge Open Issuance.

Companies selling tokens are facing massive amounts of fraud these days. Stripe Radar is getting very, very good at blocking it.

Europe can have an amazing next few decades. I hope we can play a small role in making that more likely.

$ ori [your favorite harness] --model thinkingmachines/inkling:free (More: openrouter.ai/docs/guides/or….)

$ ori --model stealth/ox-alpha It's very impressive.

The 2026 @arcinstitute Virtual Cell Challenge just launched. The grand prize is $100,000, sponsored by @NVIDIA, @10xGenomics, and @UltimaGenomics. There's a lot of interest in virtual cells these days: ML models of cells that can complement wet lab experiments. (You'll always need the wet lab to validate results, of course. But ML models can in principle search far more efficiently.) A practical challenge in the field is that benchmarking is quite difficult: cells are very complicated, and it's not a priori obvious how to compare two different models. So, inspired by the CASP protein folding contest, we're running the Virtual Cell Challenge to create a standardized way for teams around the world to compare the efficacy of different approaches, to spread awareness of what works, and ultimately -- we hope -- to support faster progress overall. t.co/KMUYwidz7r

OpenRouter is joining Stripe: t.co/JY7bledeQD. As anyone who uses it knows, @OpenRouter is a truly delightful developer tool. It is by far the best way to use new models and manage multiple inference providers. OpenRouter is also playing an increasingly important role: in the future, every business will have to manage both revenue flows and token flows. OpenRouter is the world's leading token marketplace, helping businesses effectively allocate the new currency of intelligence capital. We think that there's a lot to build together.

New Aesthetics awardee.

I love agentic coding harnesses, but they shouldn't be primarily terminal-based. The terminal is great for quick and precise commands, but information density is extremely low and UI affordances are minimal. Maybe provision of TUIs is worthwhile for occasional use (when establishing a tunnel is too annoying, or something), but it feels very strange for this to be the default modality. It took a long time for dynamic language REPLs to break out of the terminal (Jupyter notebooks and similar); I hope we don't have to wait as long for the harnesses.

The World of Yesterday is amazing.

Fast Company interviews some New Aesthetics grantees: fastcompany.com/91581814/what-…

Sprawling set of new programmable money movement capabilities coming to Stripe — page below has the full roadmap. x.com/jrfarr/status/…

I only recently learned that this pedestrian bridge sits where San Francisco's first Hall of Justice did. Before/after below. I submit this in my evidence packet to anyone who maintains that nothing has gone wrong. x.com/SFGate/status/…

Here is San Francisco's current Hall of Justice, as an aside:

After developing the app locally (two prompts), deploying it took one prompt: > Push this to Vercel. Use Stripe Projects to create the account. Store the state somewhere safe. Claude chose to use Upstash as its datastore, which seems to be working well. x.com/patrickc/statu…

Made a quick survey about the economics of AI: next-five-years.vercel.app.

(Creating this took just a few minutes thanks to Vercel, Upstash, Claude, and Stripe Projects.)

As an aside and related to these topics: Ruskin (Nature of Gothic) is the best thing I've read so far this year.

Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having spent most of my life more interested in STEM-adjacent topics. I hadn’t really considered the question consciously before, but I’m certainly thinking about aesthetics more than I used to. I think it’s a confluence of things: • Many things today are ugly and far uglier than they used to be or need to be. Once you see this, it’s kinda hard to stop perceiving it. (Early twentieth century phone boxes versus modern phone boxes; old water fountains versus new water fountains; etc.) As someone with a naively meliorist assumption that most things should be getting better rather than worse, it’s all a bit perplexing: why did we stop doing things nicely? Is it a choice? Was there a malevolent spell cast upon us? This vein led me to think more about modernism and why much of art became more intentionally "challenging", grotesque, opposed to prettiness, rebarbative, dissonant, etc. Can or should anything be done about this? Is this just how things ought to be? • Relatedly, much of modernism involved a kind of explicit repudiation of cultural continuity and represented a schism with prior practices. This is maybe most evident in American architecture, where the International Style exhibition in 1932 initiated the displacement of a rich tapestry of prior styles. This cultural break seems important and interesting to me, and I suspect that the rejection had important consequences outside of the aesthetic domain. Samuel Hughes has been exploring this question in his recent writing at @WorksInProgMag; @RuxandraTeslo is also pulling on this thread. Elaine Scarry wrote about how beauty inspires creation. If so, the inverse may also be true: ugliness inhibits it. • It’s clearly the case that changes in the aesthetic domain can at least inspire progress in other places. Petrarch helped set some of the preconditions for the Renaissance which in turn fostered the scientific revolution and Enlightenment. Things like World Fairs (the 1851 Fair at the Crystal Palace recorded 6 million admissions when the population was 21 million) reflect the popular interdependency that used to exist between aesthetics and material development. • @tedgioia and others have written about stuck culture and how so many domains seem to have ceased to straightforwardly advance in the way that they did up until the nineties or thereabouts. This is obviously peculiar and interesting. What changed, and what does it mean? Is it about the internet and fragmentation? Is it about a loss of supply? Is it just about having reached the zenith of various mediums? • I’m generally interested in markets and the dynamics of creation. In aesthetics broadly, I find the reflexivity between supply- and demand-side factors to be very thought-provoking. There’s a natural desire to view satisfaction of individual preferences as the yardstick to measure market success, but things get interesting and even a bit unsettling when we start to think about how the supply might start to shape the demand. I often think about this in the context of food. Why is food so much worse in Germany than many of its neighbors? Germany certainly doesn’t have less material ability to produce good food; indeed, Germany is richer than the countries around it. There’s probably something about German food supply chains that is impoverished relative to France and Italy, but the Germans themselves don’t seem too upset about it. It just seems that the Germans are stuck in an objectively worse market equilibrium than their neighbors: the food is bad and they’ve gotten used to it. The obvious question then is where else these kinds of reflexive patterns apply, and where else we’re stuck in some objectively inferior equilibrium, even if preferences are in some superficial sense being sated. • While this is an extremely banal and obvious point, I hadn’t until recently thought much about or internalized how much one can study reasonably objective things ("the status of women in society", say) through artwork. (Thanks to @_alice_evans for opening my eyes here.) In this vein, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities over the coming years in computational art analysis. I want something that’s conceptually similar to Google Ngram timelines but for the visual arts. • We've always tried to do things well at Stripe. I've come to see that attempting to do them beautifully is often a helpful way to break out of standard practices and to do something with greater novelty and in a way that might have other benefits besides. (Also, excellent people want to do great work because it is intrinsically satisfying. Explicitly allowing aesthetic considerations to carry weight avoids having to justify every assessment with some kind of torturous empiricism.) • In his Nobel Lecture, Solzhenitsyn said that, among the Platonic virtues of goodness, truth, and beauty, that beauty is special, for it possesses a unique kind of irrefutability. He notes that arguments, writing, and philosophical systems can all be predicated on misapprehensions, but that “a true work of art carries its verification within itself.” He proceeds to observe that when goodness and truth are threatened, the “ever surprising shoots of beauty will still force their way through.” There is a lot of specious and motivated reasoning in the world today and plenty of questionable value systems. I don’t think that beauty directly reflects any definitive trait, but I’m intrigued by the idea that it can be a marker of deeper metaphysical coherence.

What causes stagnation in the built world is one of the key questions of our era. In this month’s @WorksInProgMag, @SCP_Hughes argues quite convincingly that some of today's housing shortage is downstream of aesthetic choices. In particular, he shows that the abruptly ugly turn of postwar architecture triggered a regulatory backlash in the form of the conservation movement, which in turn stymied construction and development in urban environments across the West: t.co/KcotUv6V5j It may seem tendentious to flatly declare postwar construction ugly, but survey data is quite consistent on this point. Indeed, the sentiment is so widespread that it has spawned the Tartaria conspiracy theory. While the idea that people didn’t like the modernist construction of the postwar years is not by itself a new finding, Hughes teases out the particulars of the causality and shows how this popular rejection led to ensuing stagnation. This essay builds on Hughes’s prior work (“The beauty of concrete” and “Cheap ornament and status games”), and is I think an important contribution for anyone who cares about material progress.

Approaching 30k @mpp transactions per day. Machine-to-machine payments are starting to become a thing. mppscan.com/?d=0

The Pygmalion performance of Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Vergine is amazing. t.co/2074HTOT1j

Seems very sensible. x.com/demishassabis/…

It's been interesting and puzzling to witness the problems with accuracy in UK economic statistics over the past few years. (See the links in the next tweet for more.) It seems that the Office for National Statistics, ONS, now struggles to effectively measure basic figures such as employment, trade, and inflation. This resulted in a quite scathing government report published last summer, where Robert Devereux, a former permanent secretary, concluded that "most of the well-publicised problems with core economic statistics are the consequence of ONS’s own performance." There's a lot of discussion about the travails facing the UK these days (including this big piece in The Atlantic a few weeks ago[1]), and the problems with the ONS feel like an unsettling microcosm of diffuse decline in broader institutional competence. Anyhow: at Stripe, we became curious about the UK's published entrepreneurship data. While we observe a boom in many parts of the world, official figures don't show a similar increase in the UK. In the latest Stripe Economics post, we dug into the data, and, as far as we can tell, the official figures are probably misleading. The good and the bad news (mostly good, I think!) is that the UK is almost certainly witnessing an unmeasured boom in entrepreneurship: t.co/R7oTZNmxc6 UK-specific issues aside, I suspect that this measurement question is illustrative of forthcoming econometric challenges. Keeping the world's macro indicators up-to-date in response to the faster-than-usual changes wrought by AI will be both increasingly difficult and increasingly important in the coming years. [1] t.co/OAnwRmpyON

On the ONS: • ft.com/content/fe043c… • ft.com/content/5fd0a7… • ft.com/content/5bd04b… • blog.ons.gov.uk/2026/06/19/lea… • bbc.com/news/articles/…

I've been enjoying Victoria Whitworth's new work, The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma. I've actually never seen the Book of Kells in person, somewhat to my embarrassment. I've been doing some reading about the origins of Christianity this year, however, and I figured I should know something about the most famous Irish manuscript. (Perhaps the most famous manuscript, full stop.) Reading the book, I was struck by how much the contents have suffered over the past ~1200 years (enduring everything from water damage to reckless malfeasance in attempted nineteenth century restoration), and I wondered whether AI could help give a sense for how the work might originally have appeared. I downloaded the Internet Archive's PDF and asked my friendly neighborhood agent to use gpt-image-2 to render each page the way it imagines it might have originally appeared. Remarkably, this all worked with a single prompt, with the agent spinning up 48 workers, since each page took a minute or two. (I'm sure that someone wiser than me could prompt the model better, ensuring somewhat more historical accuracy in color restoration and so forth. There is no gold leaf in the Book of Kells!) This part of the project went from conception to completion before I'd finished my morning coffee. I then wanted some easy way to view the results online, so I asked Stripe Projects (t.co/1tSgGbSLxM) to host the result on Vercel. That also worked in basically a single prompt: t.co/5ED9TM7lJB. I also figured that people might want an easy way to download the full PDF of updated images, but it's a large (~200MB) file, so I decided that I should charge $0.10 to cover bandwidth costs using @MPP. I asked my agent to set this up, and it basically worked smoothly, though I had to tell it what MPP is (I guess it's not yet in the pretrain) and also manually set up the Cloudflare account that actually hosts the PDF and configure the API key. (Vercel seemingly has a 100MB limit.) The purchases now show up in my Stripe account alongside all other activity. The site now has a ready-made agent prompt for anyone who wants to download the whole thing. I'm guessing that we'll see a lot more UIs like this in the future. I remain pretty intrigued by the intersection of agents, micropayments, and stablecoins. I don't know much about managing crypto wallets from the CLI, but now AI can do that for me, while Stripe seamlessly handles turning it all back into fiat. So what is the moral of the story? • Whitworth's book is very good, and you should buy it. • The Internet Archive continues to be wonderful and a civilizational treasure. • While there are rough edges, setting up third-party services via the CLI now basically works. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered with any of this if I couldn't have outsourced almost all of the work to AI. • The image models have gotten very good. • There will probably continue to be all kinds of interesting applications of AI to history. (The Vesuvius Challenge of course being a shining pioneer.) • These days, I often find myself building single-use sites for things I'm learning or for books I'm reading. I think this is a cool new category of software.

Links post from @RichardHanania, noting: "A very high portion of the links comes from Works in Progress, which I think has become in essence the most must-read thing on the internet." richardhanania.com/p/indigenous-a…

Delighted to partner with Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Google, and many others, to introduce Open Standard, a new stablecoin designed for scale: joinopenstandard.com.

@Nicolas_Colin x.com/bfmtv/status/2…

@Nicolas_Colin x.com/andrewhammel1/… x.com/andrewhammel1/…

New from Stripe Economics: The Age of the Solopreneur stripeeconomics.com/p/the-age-of-t…

New project: interceptfund.com. More: interceptfund.substack.com/p/ending-respi….

I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches.

Very early experiment but I think this will be cool. stripe.directory.

Vídeo

A very kind endorsement of @WorksInProgMag from the peerless and inspiring @kevin2kelly. recomendo.com/p/works-in-pro… You can (and should!) subscribe over at worksinprogress.co/print.

I just visited Paris. The city seemed to be in particularly radiant shape this time. • It got me thinking about how many of the nicest built environments in the world standardize materials rather than form. Jerusalem's stone regulation makes it much prettier than Tel Aviv. Similarly, rules in the Charleston, the Cotswolds, and Sea Ranch leave a lot of flexibility in shape, but tightly restrict materials in a way that yields cohesion. In Paris's case, there are of course also some rules around form, but the consistency of the limestone (and zinc) is very pleasant. • I hadn’t before internalized that central Paris is unique for the fraction of its building stock that is traditional. There are of course some modern buildings, such as Centre Pompidou and the new facade at La Samaritaine, but they are rare and typically dramatic. Most pleasant old cities (such as London) contain more of a mixture. • Relatedly, is Haussmannian Paris the finest example of the central planning that Scott decries? "By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation." And is the late 19th century the last time you could have done this well, immediately before the corruptions of modernism? I guess Chicago was later, but Paris certainly comes close. • From a book I picked up: In a letter of 1886 to the Ministry of Public Works, Charles Garnier, architect of the neo-Baroque Paris Opéra, wrote, “The Metropolitan Railroad, in the eyes of most Parisians, will only be excused if it rejects absolutely all industrial character so as to be completely a work of art. Paris must not be made into a factory, it must stay a museum.” Are there elites anywhere in the world today who would reject something in the physical world unless it was a work of art? One artist recently commented to me that late 19th century France had the most educated visual culture among its elites in human history. This observation struck me a few times as I traveled around. • I am curious what those who defend modern architecture say about central Paris. Do they think that one could in principle have a place built of modern architecture that people would find as attractive and that would bring joy to so many? Do they think that such a place exists in actuality today? If not, why not? Or is the goal of having somewhere pretty and attractive in their eyes itself ignoble and saccharine? To me Paris feels like a challenge of the whole project. • Walking past the Louvre at night, I was struck by its austerity and severity. It made me reflect on how Parisians in 1700 might have felt as they took it in, and the subjugation that has been associated with social structures of prior eras. (Maybe this is on my mind partly as a result of reading Charles Taylor.) It made me wonder if I should be slightly more sympathetic to modernism for embodying a sense of individual freedom and joy. The Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Grand Palais was quite a contrast. • Perhaps heretical, but Notre Dame is just not especially impressive as a cathedral, especially inside, though the restoration seems to have been excellently done, and is a terrific achievement. Overall, Lincoln cathedral (say) is much more attractive in my view. Maybe I need to read Hugo to appreciate it better. (Hugo apparently was responsible for much of the resurgence of interest in Gothic architecture. A good example, I guess, of art driving life.) • The Renoir exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay was interesting for its emphasis on egalitarian and open relations between men and women, not something observed everywhere in the world at the time. "At the same time delicate and modest – neither moralising nor Dionysian." I thought of @_alice_evans and her work. • There are now so many bikes in Paris. It means you have to pay very active attention as a pedestrian, but is overall a big improvement. Rue de Rivoli is now dominated by the pleasant whirr of bicycles. I mostly got around this way. • The Musée Quai Branly is very interesting – it’s the best tour of the world in a single compressed space that I know of. Most of the works are not impressive as such, but the concentrated breadth is great. The Ethiopian illustrated Gospels were very charming. • Maybe my imagination, but there seemed to me to be a third fewer brasseries than on prior trips. Overall, the food was good, but not better than what you get at good restaurants in the US. The median in Paris is definitely still better, though. • The Matisse exhibition at the Grand Palais was pleasant. It mostly reminded me of the observation that it is difficult to rank artists but easy to rank the work of a given artist. The Blue Nudes and The Sheaf are just very obviously among Matisse’s best work. • The Michelangelo x Rodin exhibition at the Louvre was excellent, most of all for making clear how direct the artistic lineage is. Given the 300 year interlude, we should probably be more optimistic about the prospects for revival of the best of the visual arts. I hadn't before realized that Michelangelo's career spanned 74 years. It’s easy to focus on youth and prodigious genius, but maybe enduring genius should be more central. May we all aim to be useful and productive for a large majority of a century! In this vein, David Hockney, RIP, also just cleared the 70 year career mark. • The Louvre is quite hot; far hotter than an American museum would be. Presumably because of EU/French air conditioning laws? (26 degree regulatory minima, supposedly.) • Overall, central Paris feels like it's in very good shape. Things are generally quite clean and well-maintained. Not too much graffiti (though some buildings, such as the Louvre, are very overdue for power washing.) Nowhere felt unsafe. (Given that it’s been ruled continuously by socialists since 2001, one wonders why it has fared better than many coastal cities in America. The LLMs claim that it's because much of the funding is central and because the police report centrally, not to the mayor.) Overall, is central Paris the greatest single artistic achievement in the world? That is what I came away wondering. Pictured: Ethiopian prayer scroll; Iranian qalamkari; Renoir; af Klint.

Being comically maladapted to sunny climes, I have in endless and often unsuccessful pursuit of self-defense experimented with a sprawling battery of different sunscreens. This one is by far the best I’ve found: t.co/JpGfY3L5sY. (You need to illicitly procure the non-US version; the FDA valiantly shields us from its benefits due to their restrictive and seldom-updated set of permissible sunscreen ingredients.)

The @Tempo mainnet launched 93 days ago. Quick summary of the current state: • Run rate payment volume is around $3 billion. There's a long way to go, but it's cool to see real usage already emerging. (It took Stripe a lot longer than 93 days to get to $3 billion.) • As a blockchain, we obviously don't know about all the different use-cases. (Please tell us if you're doing something cool with Tempo!) Larger companies using Tempo include @Deel, which is using Tempo to pay out to their vast network of contractors, and @Meta, which is using it via @Link for global payouts. There are a bunch of other large companies working on Tempo integrations that'll be announced soon. • Internally, developing on Tempo has been fun, and Tempo is now Stripe's default blockchain for new features. • On the AI side of things, there appear to be around 1,000 active services selling to agents via the Machine Payments Protocol (@mpp). There's a useful directory of available services at t.co/fAZ5iA5nZc. 570 unique agents, for example, seem to have purchased from @ExaAILabs, and 332 from @openweather. I don't know how long it'll take for this use-case to become big, but it seems all-but inevitable that it will within a few years. • Today, @Stripe, @Visa, and @StanChart are running Tempo validators. Validation will become more decentralized over time. • The Tempo team is building a lot of new protocol functionality. For example, privacy zones, receive policies, and virtual addresses. (Details for all on the Tempo blog: t.co/jE7ltNIaj2.) In general, our belief is that there's a lot of functionality to be built at the blockchain level to make higher-level applications easy and performant. The original thesis behind Tempo was that both AI and stablecoins would stretch blockchains in new ways, with need for privacy, fees denominated/payable in stablecoins, batch transactions, microtransactions, faster confirmations, and so forth. Overall, this still seems like the right set of bets, and the agentic stuff is happening somewhat faster than I was expecting. "1M stablecoin TPS, with the vast majority from agents" still seems like the right north star.

Very much enjoyed this piece in the latest @WorksInProgMag about how Alberta became a rat-free sanctuary and the only significant human-inhabited place on earth that is free of them. Excellent "you can just do things" energy. "William Lobay, a crop protection supervisor at the Alberta Department of Agriculture, came up with the idea of a buffer zone focused on the area of prairie and parkland that was most vulnerable to penetration. In late 1950, Albertan officials approved his Rat Control Zone, a roughly 600-by-29-kilometer strip along the part of its eastern border with Saskatchewan. In the zone, William Lobay and his colleagues surveyed cargo and vehicles that entered the province, and inspected vulnerable sites like farms, grain elevators, feed stacks, barns, sheds, and abandoned buildings, where food and shelter made rat establishment most likely." t.co/t8sGM5BTJI

Congratulations to @eoghan, @destraynor, and the whole Fin team! x.com/eoghan/status/…

Delighted to partner with @LloydsBank to bring Stripe’s capabilities to millions of new businesses. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

I want some kind of LLM workflow tool. • Ability to manage a set of input files (Markdown or similar), plus other general-purpose context. • With real-time collaboration. (And maybe some concept of snapshots or VCS integration.) • And the ability to create/manage a inference

Sad to hear that Ada's Technical Books in Seattle is closing this week -- it's a wonderful bookstore. I always found something obscure but interesting when I visited. adasbooks.com

Every time I fly to New York, I'm struck by how many trees there are in the densely-populated areas around the city. (Coming from the West Coast, one arrives over the Garden State, and the suitability of the sobriquet is quite apparent from the air.) It feels like this degree of

I’ve been struck by this phenomenon in much of the discussion around Hormuz. Who exactly should one listen to for systems as complex and reflexive as energy? (Evidently not IEA.) Is it even possible to make meaningful predictions for out-of-distribution shocks like strait closure x.com/lugaricano/sta…

Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants. Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on

Interesting @DouthatNYT on @nanransohoff's essay, @WillManidis's pieces, and (in passing) the call for New Aesthetics: nytimes.com/2026/05/23/opi….

Cool release from @p0. I think this use-case (agents paying content creators for access via @mpp) will be very big. Micropayment walls haven't worked (as Clay Shirky anticipated many years ago) because of human cognitive overhead, but agents can make arbitrarily granular x.com/p0/status/2056…