I hear your argument, I do.

I think the "money instead of tokens" is the important part. Money and tokens are fundamentally different was part of my argument (that I did not make well). It's not clear that it is a good thing for money movers to get into the token business (this apples to Ramp as well).

Banks are also intermediaries between parties (at scale, really between any parties). One could use similar logic to say that it therefore makes sense for Wells Fargo to start buying homebuilders because the home buyers will eventually be paying Wells anyway.

BankRate similarly processes volume of consumer mortgage quotes in real-time communication with lender APIs. They also do not have a reason to own a token router, even though their business involves similar processes to what you outline for Stripe.

Being an intermediary in a value chain does not mean you're critical path, or that it makes sense for you to be in the critical path.

Funnily enough, you argue that this is a natural fit for Stripe while a peer reply argues that it's a change in the business a la Amazon->AWS.

Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts.