Stripe and Tempo Launch the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP) for AI Agent Transactions

Author: Tempo / Liam Horne

Compiled by Deep潮 TechFlow

Deep潮 Summary: With the Tempo mainnet live, the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), co-drafted by Stripe, has been launched—this is not an isolated crypto project building its own ecosystem; Visa, Anthropic, OpenAI, Mastercard, and Shopify have all simultaneously integrated this open standard.

The core innovation of MPP is the "session" mechanism, similar to OAuth in the payments domain: the Agent authorizes once and pre-deposits funds, after which each API call or data consumption is automatically settled in real time without requiring individual on-chain transactions.

If this protocol becomes the industry standard, AI agents' "autonomous spending" will shift from concept to a scalable reality.

The full text is as follows:

Tempo mainnet is officially live!

Tempo is an internet-grade infrastructure designed for real-world payments. It is built to deliver instant settlement, predictable low fees, high throughput, and global availability. Starting today, you can begin building on Tempo through our public RPC endpoint.

Start building →

Alongside the mainnet launch, we also released the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP)—an open standard for machine payments co-drafted by Stripe and Tempo. See below for details.

When we first launched Tempo in September, the premise was simple: if stablecoins become the foundational layer of internet commerce, then the infrastructure for moving funds must be built specifically for payments.

Stablecoins enable instant cross-border settlement and 24/7 availability. However, most existing blockchains are not designed for large-scale payment workloads, resulting in fluctuating fees, limited throughput, and transaction structures unsuited for common payment workflows.

Unlike other blockchains, Tempo is designed around the needs of a real payment system: predictable costs, high throughput, and reliable settlement for large volumes of transactions.

Over the past few months, a new category of applications has made these needs more visible:

Agents can now write code, coordinate services, retrieve data, and execute complex workflows across the internet. However, as these systems' capabilities continue to grow, they increasingly need to conduct transactions.

A research agent may need to pay to access a specific dataset. A development agent may need to purchase computing power or testing infrastructure. A workflow agent may need to coordinate multiple services, making separate payments upon completion of each task.

In these scenarios, payments become continuous and programmable. Instead of a single transaction between two parties, a single workflow may involve dozens or even hundreds of micro-payments to different services.

This model quickly revealed the limitations of existing payment infrastructure.

Traditional payment systems assume that transactions are initiated by humans and undergo manual approval processes. Many existing blockchains were also not designed for high-frequency, low-value transactions—scenarios where predictable costs and reliability are critical.

Tempo provides settlement infrastructure for interactions of this scale, enabling agents to trade programmatically.

To establish these foundations, we are launching the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP)—an open standard for machine payments. MPP is designed to be scalable and payment-method agnostic, and currently supports stablecoins, debit and credit cards, and more payment methods.

MPP provides a standardized, programmatic way for agents and services to coordinate payments. Instead of each service inventing its own billing process, MPP defines a simple protocol for initiating, authorizing, and settling payments between machines.

We chose to release MPP as an open standard to ensure consistent machine payments across services and payment channels.

MPP currently runs on Tempo, but the protocol itself is designed to be agnostic and scalable across underlying rails. For example, our design partner Visa has extended MPP to support card payments on its network. Stripe has extended it to support card payments, wallets, and other payment methods through its platform. Lightspark has also extended it to support Bitcoin payments on the Lightning Network.

MPP enables agents to autonomously pay for services: the agent requests resources from a service, and the service responds with a payment request. The agent authorizes payment from their wallet, the transaction is settled instantly, and the service immediately delivers the requested resources to the agent.

This mechanism is implemented through a new primitive called a "session," designed to support recurring payments. Think of it as OAuth for payments: authorize once, then allow automatic payments within a set limit.

When an Agent initiates a session, it pre-locks funds. As the Agent consumes resources from services (API calls, model inference, data queries, etc.), payments flow continuously without requiring an on-chain transaction for each individual interaction.

Thousands of small transactions can be aggregated into a single settlement transaction, making true pay-per-use feasible at internet scale.

Our payment directory provides a unified catalog of MPP-compatible services that any agent can automatically transact with.

Service providers can also integrate to monetize their services and make them discoverable by agents. MPP supports multiple scenarios, including pay-per-call APIs, monetized MCP servers, paid content and data, and multi-service workflows.

At launch, the payment directory included integrations with over 100 services, covering model providers, developer infrastructure, compute platforms, and data services, including Alchemy, Dune Analytics, Merit Systems, and Parallel Web Systems.

Although Agent represents a new type of business model emerging on Tempo, our infrastructure also supports traditional payment scenarios, including global payroll, cross-border remittances, embedded finance, and tokenized deposits—use cases that remain surprisingly difficult to build and operate.

Since the public testnet launched in December last year, we have been working with design partners in the payments, commerce, and financial services sectors to migrate real payment workloads to stablecoins:

Global Payroll: A platform for bulk disbursements to employees, sellers, and creators, typically handling millions of payments simultaneously. Such systems require predictable costs and reliable throughput. Tempo’s dedicated payment channels enable instant settlement for large-scale payroll operations, unaffected by congestion or fee fluctuations.

Cross-border remittances: Current international transfers typically require multiple intermediary institutions and can take several days to settle. Partners are testing remittance channels on Tempo to achieve settlement in seconds, with full auditability and predictable costs.

Embedded Finance: Software companies are increasingly integrating payment processes directly into their products. Tempo’s smart accounts and protocol-level notes enable developers to embed financial workflows directly into their products without building separate ledger infrastructure.

Tokenized deposits: Financial institutions are exploring tokenized representations of deposits and other assets to enable continuous settlement, rather than being limited by traditional banking hours. Tempo provides reconciliation primitives and compliance registries that align with traditional financial control systems, while supporting real-time settlement.

We are collaborating with partners such as Anthropic, DoorDash, Mastercard, Nubank, OpenAI, Ramp, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa to bring these use cases to mainnet. We will also launch additional features designed specifically for enterprise payment workloads and share further updates over the coming months.

The Tempo mainnet has officially launched today.

Developers building Agents can now start using MPP to enable Agents to pay for services. Fund the Agent’s wallet, set spending limits, and allow Agents to autonomously conduct transactions online.

Developers building global payment systems can use Tempo’s infrastructure to enable high-throughput settlement, cross-border transfers, and embedded financial workflows.

You can get started by:

• Create a wallet on Tempo and initiate your first transaction.
• Explore the Machine Payment Protocol documentation and SDK
• Monetize your API through the payment catalog and make it available to Agents.
• Build directly on the Tempo mainnet via public RPC endpoints