Tempo, the payment infrastructure incubated by crypto VC Paradigm and payments giant Stripe, launched its mainnet on March 18. The project also unveiled the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), co-developed with Stripe, targeting the growing AI agent economy. Major firms including Visa, Mastercard, OpenAI, and Shopify have joined the ecosystem.
Designed for AI Agents: Solving Legacy Payment Pain Points
Existing blockchains were not built for large-scale payment workloads—fee volatility and throughput limits remain critical hurdles. As AI agents proliferate, they need to autonomously make frequent, low-value payments for compute, data, or API calls. MPP enables automated payment coordination between AI agents and services, completing request, authorization, and settlement without human intervention.
Sessions Primitive: One-Time Authorization, Continuous Payments
Tempo's new primitive, Sessions, works like OAuth for pay. Users authorize once, allowing an AI agent to make recurring payments within defined limits. Thousands of microtransactions are batched into a single onchain settlement, making true pay-per-use viable at internet scale.
Ecosystem Giants: Visa, Mastercard, OpenAI, Shopify on Board
On the payments front, Visa has extended MPP to support card payments on its network; Mastercard, Revolut, and Nubank are exploring moving global lending and cross-border remittances to Tempo. On the AI side, OpenAI and Anthropic are using the infrastructure to let AI handle payment flows autonomously. E-commerce platforms Shopify and DoorDash, along with payment tool Ramp, are testing Tempo's embedded finance solutions. The payment directory already integrates over 100 services, including Alchemy and Dune Analytics. Developers can now build directly on the Tempo mainnet via public RPC endpoints.