Stripe-Backed Protocol Lets AI Agents Transact Autonomously

Tempo, a payment-focused blockchain incubated by Stripe and cryptocurrency venture firm Paradigm, launched its mainnet and introduced an open standard for machine payments Wednesday (March 18).

With the mainnet now live, developers can now build on Tempo through its public remote procedure call (RPC) endpoints, Tempo said in a Wednesday blog post.

“Tempo is infrastructure for real-world payments at internet scale,” the company said in the post. “It’s designed for instant settlement, predictable low fees, high throughput and global availability.”

In the time since Tempo was announced in September 2025, the rise of agentic AI has made clear the need for agentic payments for things like access to a dataset, compute or testing infrastructure, and services needed to complete tasks, according to the post.

“Tempo provides the settlement infrastructure for this scale of interactions, allowing agents to transact programmatically,” Tempo said in the blog post.

The infrastructure also supports established payment flows such as global payouts, cross-border remittances, embedded finance and tokenized deposits, per the post.

The open standard for machine payments announced Wednesday by Tempo is called the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) and is co-authored by Stripe and Tempo, according to the post.

MPP provides a standard way for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically and enables machine payments to work across services and payment rails, per the post. It currently works with stablecoins, cards and other supported payment methods.

“MPP runs on Tempo today, but the protocol itself is designed to be rail-agnostic and extensible,” Tempo said in the post. “For example, our design partner Visa has already extended MPP to support card-based payments on their network.”

When Tempo was introduced in September 2025, the company said its payments-first blockchain was purpose-built for stablecoins and real-world payments. The blockchain’s priorities include predictable low fees, opt-in privacy, payments/gas in any stablecoin, a payments-first user experience, and scale, the company said at the time.

The company launched its public testnet in December 2025, saying that anyone could start building on Tempo and that the network was being tested by many of the world’s leading companies.

Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm and project lead for Tempo, told Bloomberg in December: “The crypto ecosystem can be quite intimidating. We want to close that developer experience gap for people thinking about real-world use cases for stablecoins.”

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