Tempo launchs its mainnet with Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) for AAI agents

Tempo, the payments-focused blockchain incubated by Stripe and crypto venture firm Paradigm, has launched its mainnet, opening public developer endpoints.

Also, the blockchain has co-authored the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard for autonomous agent-to-agent payments with Stripe.

The mainnet’s launch follows a public testnet that went live in December 2025, and it comes at a time when both upstarts and established players in the payments space alike are scrambling to claim market share by laying down the infrastructure layer for agentic commerce, which has been touted as one of the next best things for the sector.

Tempo raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in October 2025 and has attracted design partners including Anthropic, DoorDash, Mastercard, Nubank, OpenAI, Ramp, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa.

However, it is not without competition as Circle, the USDC issuer, is developing its own payments-focused Layer-1 chain, Arc, whose testnet launched in October with participation from Visa, BlackRock, and Goldman Sachs.

Matt Huang, Tempo’s co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm, acknowledged that the market remains nascent. “Agentic payments is very early, and we still are figuring out the best way to structure these,” he told Fortune. 

What does Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) do?

MPP is designed to give AI agents a standard, rail-agnostic mechanism for coordinating payments programmatically. Rather than each service inventing its own billing flow, the protocol defines how agents request, authorize, and settle payments with external services, across stablecoins, cards, and other payment methods simultaneously.

With the MPP, thousands of small transactions can be aggregated into a single settlement, making true pay-per-use pricing viable at internet scale.

Stripe has extended MPP to support cards, wallets, and other payment methods on its platform; Visa has extended it for card-based payments across its network; and Lightspark has extended it for Bitcoin Lightning payments. 

A directory of more than 100 compatible services, spanning model providers, developer infrastructure, and data platforms, launches alongside mainnet. 

Early Stripe MPP integrations include Browserbase, which lets agents spin up headless browsers and pay per session, and Prospect Butcher Co., which lets agents order food for delivery.

Cloudflare also supports MPP, which was also acknowledged by Huang.

MPP enters a field already contested by Coinbase’s x402 protocol, which embeds stablecoin micropayments directly into the HTTP communication layer and is backed by a coalition that includes Cloudflare, Circle, Stripe, and Amazon Web Services. 

Analysts at McKinsey estimate that AI agents could mediate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030.

AI agent race powers institutional stablecoin rush 

The mainnet launch arrives twenty-four hours after Mastercard agreed to acquire London-based stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, the largest stablecoin acquisition on record, surpassing Stripe’s own $1.1 billion purchase of Bridge in February 2025. 

The deal is intended to link on-chain stablecoin payments with Mastercard’s global network for cross-border transfers, remittances, and business-to-business transactions.

“We expect that most financial institutions and fintechs will in time provide digital currency services,” said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer, in a statement. Analysts at William Blair described the acquisition as “further affirmation of the stablecoin market for cross-border commerce.”

The two announcements in many ways hint that the contest for stablecoin payment infrastructure is no longer at the experimentation phase and that the stakeholders in the space are already building for the present and a future where AI agents use stablecoins routinely as they perform tasks all over the internet.

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