Stripe-Backed Tempo Launches AI Payments Protocol as Race for Agentic Commerce Heats Up
Stripe-backed payments blockchain Tempo has launched its mainnet alongside a new open-source Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), designed to let AI agents send and receive money autonomously across both fiat and crypto rails.
The protocol, co-authored by Stripe and Tempo, defines how AI agents and software services request, authorise, and settle payments programmatically. It is payment-method agnostic, working across cards, wallets, and stablecoins, and is compatible with Stripe's existing infrastructure.
How the Machine Payments Protocol Works
MPP introduces a "sessions" primitive that allows agents to authorise a spending limit upfront and then stream micropayments continuously without requiring a separate transaction for each interaction. An agent requests a resource, receives a payment request, authorises the transaction within pre-set limits, and the service delivers instantly.
At launch, over 100 services are already listed in the MPP directory — including model providers, compute platforms, and data APIs — ready to transact with any MPP-compatible agent.
"Agentic payments is very early," said Matt Huang, co-founder of Tempo and managing partner at Paradigm. "We're still figuring out the best way to structure these."
The Tempo Blockchain
Tempo's purpose-built Layer 1 blockchain is designed specifically for high-speed payments, offering 100,000+ transactions per second with approximately 0.5-second deterministic finality. The chain is EVM-compatible and features dedicated payment lanes that prevent payment transactions from competing with other activity for block space.
The blockchain is stablecoin-neutral, with payments and gas fees payable in any stablecoin. Elliptic has integrated as a compliance partner at launch.
Backing and Partners
Tempo was jointly incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. The company raised a $500 million Series A at a $5 billion valuation in 2025, with investment from Thrive Capital and Greenoaks. Design partners include Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Mastercard, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Ramp, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa.
The Agentic Payments Race
Tempo's launch comes amid a broader industry push to build payment infrastructure for AI agents. Coinbase has launched its x402 protocol embedding stablecoin payments into HTTP requests, along with dedicated "Agentic Wallets" for AI agents. Visa has released a Trusted Agent Protocol operating on existing card infrastructure. Google has published its own Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2). And Mastercard recently completed Europe's first live AI-agent bank payment inside Santander's regulated infrastructure.
The emerging consensus is that regulated consumer commerce will remain on card rails, while machine-to-machine payments — agents hiring agents, per-API-call payments, compute purchasing — will migrate to stablecoins, where traditional networks' minimum fees make micro-transactions unviable.
