Stripe Launches Machine Payments Protocol for AI Agents

Stripe and Tempo launched the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) on March 18, an open standard that lets AI agents make autonomous payments without human approval at each transaction. The protocol works across stablecoins, cards, and Bitcoin Lightning. If you build agents that need to pay for services, compute, or data, this is the infrastructure layer that was missing.

Protocol design

MPP defines a standard way for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically. Instead of each service building its own billing integration, MPP provides a shared protocol for requesting, authorizing, and settling payments between machines.

MPP supports two payment modes. Charges handle one-time payments. A single API call, content access, or a one-off purchase settles in roughly 500ms. Sessions handle continuous, streaming payments. Think of sessions as OAuth for money: an agent opens a session, deposits funds into an escrow, and defines spending limits. As the agent consumes resources (API calls, model inference, data queries), payments stream continuously without requiring a separate on-chain transaction for each interaction. Thousands of small payments aggregate into a single settlement transaction.

This solves a real problem. Traditional payment rails assume human-initiated transactions and manual approval flows. Most blockchains were not designed for high-frequency, low-value payments where predictable costs matter most.

Payment methods and partners

MPP launches with support across multiple rails:

Payment Rail	Partner	Status
Stablecoins (USDC)	Tempo	Live
Cards	Stripe card networks	Live
Bitcoin Lightning	Lightspark	Live

The protocol is designed to be extensible. Visa has already extended MPP to support card-based payments on its network, and Lightspark added Bitcoin Lightning support.

In a related announcement the same day, Stripe expanded Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs) to support Mastercard Agent Pay, Visa Intelligent Commerce, and BNPL methods including Affirm and Klarna for agentic commerce. SPTs are a separate Stripe primitive for agent-initiated transactions, not part of MPP itself, but they serve the same broader goal of enabling agents to transact. Sellers already processing payments through Stripe automatically support these new methods.

Payments directory

Tempo launched a payments directory with over 100 integrated services at launch. Named integrations include Alchemy, Dune Analytics, Merit Systems, and Parallel Web Systems. Any MPP-compatible service is automatically discoverable by agents. Service providers can register to monetize their APIs, MCP servers, gated content, and data.

Use cases include agents paying for LLM inference, image generation, web search, compute, and data queries.

Tempo mainnet

MPP needs a settlement layer fast enough for thousands of small, programmatic payments. Most existing blockchains were not designed for that. Fees fluctuate, throughput is limited, and transaction structures are poorly suited to high-frequency payment flows.

Tempo is a blockchain built specifically to solve this. Co-developed by Stripe and Paradigm, it launched its mainnet on the same day as MPP. The design priorities are instant settlement, predictable low fees, and high throughput for large volumes of small transactions. Think of it as the payment rail underneath MPP, purpose-built for the kind of continuous, machine-to-machine payments that agents generate.

Tempo’s partner list includes Anthropic, DoorDash, Mastercard, Nubank, OpenAI, Ramp, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa. Beyond agent payments, the infrastructure supports global payouts, cross-border remittances, embedded finance, and tokenized deposits.

Integration

For developers building AI agents, the integration uses official MPP SDKs available in TypeScript, Python, and Rust. Payments land directly in your Stripe balance and settle in fiat. Metrics, reporting, and multi-currency payouts work the same as any other Stripe payment. MPP is designed to be rail-agnostic, so the protocol works independently of the underlying settlement layer.

Stripe’s machine payments are currently available to US entities in all states except New York and Texas.

The MPP documentation covers the full protocol spec, SDKs, and integration guides. Developers can fund an agent wallet on Tempo, define spending limits, and start transacting.

Competitive context

MPP enters a growing field of agent payment protocols. Existing approaches include x402 (HTTP-native stablecoin micropayments, also supported by Stripe), ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol, co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe for shopping flows), and UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol by Google for merchant discovery and checkout). Each targets a different slice of the problem: x402 handles simple per-request crypto payments, ACP standardizes chat-to-buy commerce, UCP enables agent-to-merchant discovery, and MPP provides session-based streaming payments across multiple rails.

For teams building production agent systems that need to pay for external services programmatically, MPP is the first open protocol with session-based streaming payments, native stablecoin and card support, and direct integration with Stripe’s existing merchant infrastructure. The practical next step is reviewing the MPP spec and evaluating whether your agent workflows have payment needs that justify early integration.