Stripe-Backed Tempo Network Launches With Focus on AI Agent Payments

Tempo, the payments-focused layer-1 blockchain from Stripe and Paradigm, launched its mainnet connected Wednesday, providing cardinal infrastructure for the agentic system successful the process. 

Alongside the network’s launch, Tempo unveiled a caller unfastened modular for agentic payments—the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP). The protocol, co-authored by Stripe and the Tempo team, circumvents the “limitations of existing outgo rails,” allowing agents to transact seamlessly. 

“MPP provides a modular mode for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically,” the web wrote. “Instead of each work inventing its ain billing flow, MPP defines a elemental protocol for requesting, authorizing, and settling payments betwixt machines.” 

The unfastened modular has already been enhanced by a brace of the network’s aboriginal motorboat partners, including planetary payments elephantine Visa, which extended MPP to enactment card-based payments, and Lightspark, which did truthful for Bitcoin payments connected the Lightning Network. Stripe excessively added connected functionality, creating enactment for “cards, wallets, and different outgo methods.” 

“MPP lets an cause wage for services autonomously: An cause tin petition a assets from a service, and the work responds with a outgo request,” the announcement reads. “The cause past authorizes outgo from its wallet, the transaction settles instantly, and the work delivers the requested assets to the agent.”

According to the network, the functionality is imaginable acknowledgment to its instauration of “sessions,” which allows for a watercourse of payments to beryllium made programmatically based connected existing, defined limits. The web has already released a directory of compatible services with which agents tin interact with and wage for, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. 

In summation to its agentic enhancements, Tempo says it “architected the infrastructure” to combat traditional, arcane solutions related to planetary payments, cross-border remittances, and more. 

The network’s absorption connected the agentic system amplifies a crescendoing inclination among blockchain companies. In September, the Ethereum Foundation created its ain artificial quality team, signaling the value of the exertion and its imaginable interplay with blockchain and cryptocurrencies. 

The foundation’s archetypal absorption was connected ERC-8004, an Ethereum Improvement Proposal that likewise enables agents to transact seamlessly crossed the Ethereum blockchain. It besides backed an open-source protocol from Google that tackles the aforesaid issue. Crypto speech Coinbase has besides been focused connected enabling agentic payments, launching a wallet with built-in guardrails successful February.