- Tempo has launched its Mainnet and Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) to support AI-driven commerce, combining blockchain infrastructure with a standardized way for agents to initiate and manage payments across rails.
- The protocol also introduces “session-based” transactions that remove the need for traditional checkout flows and enable real-time, pay-per-use models.
- As agentic commerce and stablecoin adoption grow, Tempo is positioning itself at the forefront of development.
Payments blockchain Tempo unveiled its Mainnet this week, alongside a new payments standard designed for AI-driven commerce. Tempo Mainnet focuses on serving needs specifically in the payments space, offering instant settlement, low fees, and high throughput for transactions across the globe.
In addition to the Tempo Mainnet infrastructure, the company also released its Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard for agentic payments. MPP is payment agnostic and is able to work with stablecoins, cards, Affirm, Klarna, and other payment methods. While Tempo Mainnet provides the underlying blockchain infrastructure for settlement, MPP acts as the coordination layer that enables agents to initiate and manage payments across different networks and payment methods.
“We decided to launch MPP as an open standard so that machine payments can work consistently across services and payment rails,” the company said in a blog post announcement.
MPP provides a standardized way for AI agents and services to initiate, authorize, and settle payments programmatically. While traditional platforms build their own billing and checkout flow, MPP allows a service to request payment from an agent, which can then approve the transaction and complete it instantly from its wallet.
The protocol also introduces “sessions,” which enable continuous, streaming payments that allow agents to pay incrementally for usage (such as in an API call) without requiring a separate transaction each time. Because it brings the payment logic into a shared standard, MPP enables agents to transact across different services and payment methods.
Creating a standardized approach to agent-led payments is increasingly important as developments and interest in agentic payments, combined with the increased use of stablecoins, skyrocket. Traditional checkout flows and billing systems are too slow and fragmented to handle a future in which AI agents purchase services, access data, and execute workflows autonomously. Tempo’s standardized way of enabling machines to request and settle payments across rails positions the company on the leading edge of agentic commerce.
Tempo, which has been trialing MPP since December of 2025, leverages partnerships with Anthropic, DoorDash, Mastercard, Nubank, OpenAI, Ramp, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa to bring global payments, cross-border remittances, embedded finance, and tokenized deposits use cases.
The California-based company also revealed plans to introduce more features designed to support enterprise payment workloads, and disclosed it will have “more to share” in the coming months.
Photo by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA
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