Agentic payments go live
Stripe‑backed Tempo launched a Machine Payments Protocol and deployed its Tempo L1 blockchain to mainnet to enable autonomous AI‑to‑AI transactions, and Coinbase is simultaneously investing in agent‑native payment infrastructure. These moves push programmable, agentic payments from concept to deployable infrastructure for real-world reconciliation and routing. (fortune.com) (bankless.com) (pymnts.com)
Tempo reported a $500 million Series A that valued the startup at roughly $5 billion in October 2025, with Thrive Capital and Greenoaks named as lead investors. (theblock.co) Tempo’s developer announcement shows public RPC endpoints were opened on March 18, 2026, enabling builders to connect to the network programmatically. (tempo.xyz) The Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) is described in press coverage as an open standard co‑authored with Stripe that is rail‑agnostic and designed to coordinate programmatic payments between services. (pymnts.com) Technical primitives in the MPP release include a “sessions” model that lets agents pre‑authorize a spending limit and stream micropayments without requiring an on‑chain transaction for every interaction. (kucoin.com) Tempo’s launch materials and ecosystem notes list a payments directory with more than 100 integrated service providers, naming Alchemy, Dune Analytics, Anthropic, OpenAI and Shopify among initial participants. (theblock.co) Coinbase’s agent strategy moved earlier: Agentic Wallets went live on February 11, 2026 on the x402 protocol, and Coinbase says the x402 flows have already processed tens of millions of transactions. (coinbase.com)
