Stripe's Tempo goes live
Stripe’s crypto joint venture Tempo launched a ‘Machine Payments Protocol’ to enable low‑cost blockchain payments between AI agents, signaling a new payments layer for autonomous transactions. That development raises questions about future compensation or token‑based incentives at startups building agent or payments infrastructure. (siliconrepublic.com)
Tempo’s mainnet went live on March 18, 2026, and the project opened public RPC endpoints for developers to build on the chain. (tempo.xyz) The Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) was released as an open, rail‑agnostic standard co‑authored by Stripe and Tempo and is explicitly designed to work with stablecoins, cards and other payment methods. (tempo.xyz) MPP introduces a “sessions” primitive that lets software agents authorize spending limits up front and stream micropayments continuously without an on‑chain transaction per interaction. (kucoin.com) Stripe, Visa and Lightspark have already extended MPP to support cards, wallets and Bitcoin Lightning respectively, and Tempo published a payments directory listing over 100 compatible services at launch. (kucoin.com) Tempo closed a reported $500 million Series A in October 2025 that valued the project at about $5 billion, in a round led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital with participation from Sequoia, Ribbit and SV Angel. (cointelegraph.com) Matt Huang, co‑founder and managing partner at Paradigm, was tapped to lead Tempo as CEO while retaining his role at Paradigm, a move first reported in August 2025. (finance.yahoo.com) Tempo announced it will not issue a native token at mainnet launch and will adopt a TIP‑20 model that lets users pay gas in stablecoins while the team waits for a clearer market and regulatory environment before designing tokenomics. (kucoin.com)
