Stripe and Visa: how the new machine payments protocol works with the Tempo blockchain

Financial heavyweights are accelerating experiments in AI-driven finance as a new machine payments protocol debuts alongside the live launch of Tempo’s blockchain.

Stripe-backed Tempo unveils Machine Payments Protocol

The fintech giant Stripe, together with Tempo, a blockchain startup it incubated with venture firm Paradigm, unveiled an open-source “Machine Payments Protocol” on Wednesday to streamline how AI agents send and receive money. The network supports both traditional fiat currencies and cryptocurrency, and it is fully compatible with Stripe’s existing AI-focused payments infrastructure.

For now, the new AI payments network runs solely on top of Tempo, which is also the name of the underlying blockchain developed by the Stripe-backed startup. However, it is designed from the outset to function across multiple blockchains and payments rails rather than remain tied to a single chain or provider.

On Wednesday, Tempo also confirmed that its blockchain is now live, after operating in a testing phase for the past three-and-a-half months. Moreover, the company is pitching the chain as the base layer for a new class of autonomous financial interactions between software agents, merchants, and end users.

Agentic AI and the rise of autonomous payments

“Agentic payments is very early, and we still are figuring out the best way to structure these,” Matt Huang, cofounder of Tempo and managing partner at Paradigm, told Fortune. He said the team aimed for what it sees as an elegant, minimal, and efficient protocol that others can extend without any need for permission from the core developers.

Agentic payments describes transactions executed by AI agents or autonomous bots that move money on behalf of human users. That said, the arena remains nascent, even as technologists imagine future scenarios in which agents crawl the web and pay each other to access news articles, purchase goods from Amazon, or download data sets.

In that context, the launch of an explicit agentic payments protocol is intended to provide common rules for how these AI systems initiate, authorize, and settle transfers. Moreover, the Tempo team argues that standardized interfaces will be essential if many different AI agents and merchant services are to interoperate at scale.

Tempo blockchain targets high-speed payments and stablecoins

Tempo raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in 2025 from Silicon Valley investors including Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital. Backers see the project as well positioned to benefit from the next wave of machine-driven commerce and programmable payments.

The startup’s blockchain is optimized for high-speed payments and stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets such as the U.S. dollar. However, the team also envisions the chain serving as infrastructure for cross-border flows and potential cross chain payments as the protocol matures.

Unlike some earlier networks built mainly for speculative trading, Tempo is framed as a settlement layer for machine-to-machine interactions. That said, its designers expect human users and traditional businesses to interact with the system through wallets, APIs, and payment gateways that abstract most blockchain complexity away.

Competing frameworks from Coinbase, Google and others

The protocol co-designed by Tempo and Stripe is not the only attempt to formalize rules for autonomous payments. Coinbase has created its own network, called x402, which references the “402 Payment Required” HTTP error code proposed by early internet pioneers as a placeholder for online payments.

In parallel, Google introduced a new payments scheme in September that supports both traditional credit cards and stablecoins. Moreover, developers in the broader crypto ecosystem are experimenting with additional frameworks that could eventually link on-chain liquidity, off-chain banking systems, and merchant platforms.

Within this competitive environment, the machine payments initiative from Stripe and Tempo seeks to become a neutral, extensible standard. However, its adoption will likely depend on how quickly AI developers and payment providers integrate its tools into real-world products.

Visa’s role and card-based agent payments

The payments giant Visa contributed to the “Machine Payments Protocol” by helping define how AI agents can transact using credit and debit cards. Specifically, Visa worked on specifications that enable an agent to initiate, authorize, and reconcile card-based transactions while preserving existing security and compliance safeguards.

“We look at MPP as another way that you can have a very clear, defined protocol around how an agent communicates with merchants,” Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, told Fortune. Moreover, this work dovetails with Visa’s broader efforts around visa credit card integration into digital wallets, crypto rails, and programmable payments systems.

For Stripe, the expansion of stripe ai payments tooling for autonomous agents aligns with its strategy of abstracting complexity for developers. That said, merchant adoption will depend on whether the new standards reduce integration friction compared to existing card and bank payment solutions.

Outlook for AI-native financial infrastructure

Developers involved in the project argue that a dedicated framework for machine payments will ultimately be necessary if AI agents are to handle large volumes of low-value, automated transactions. However, regulators and traditional financial institutions are still assessing how such flows should be monitored and controlled.

Moreover, it remains to be seen whether open-source standards like MPP, proprietary systems such as Coinbase’s x402, or big-tech schemes from players like Google will dominate the emerging landscape. In the meantime, the live Tempo blockchain and its agent-focused protocol mark an early test of how autonomous software can interact with money at internet speed.

In summary, Stripe, Tempo, Visa, Coinbase, and Google are converging on a similar vision: AI agents that can seamlessly pay for services, content, and data, with blockchain, stablecoins, and card networks all acting as critical rails.