Stripe and Tempo Launch Machine Payments Protocol — Open Standard for AI Agent Payments Goes Live with Mainnet

On March 18, 2026, Stripe and Tempo jointly launched the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open internet-native payment standard designed specifically for AI agents. This is a landmark moment: the largest payment processor in tech is now formally building infrastructure for agent-to-service commerce.

MPP addresses a fundamental friction in the agent economy: current financial tools were built for humans. Making a purchase typically requires account creation, pricing page navigation, payment details entry, and billing setup — steps that often require human intervention. MPP eliminates this by providing a specification for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically.

How MPP Works:

• An agent requests a resource from any HTTP-addressable endpoint (API, MCP server, service)
• The service responds with a payment request
• The agent authorizes payment
• The resource is delivered

For Stripe businesses, these payments appear in the Dashboard like normal transactions — same settlement, same fraud protection, same reporting infrastructure.

Key Technical Details:

• Supports fiat payments (cards, buy now pay later) via Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs)
• Supports stablecoin payments via Tempo mainnet (also launched March 18)
• Integrates with Stripe PaymentIntents API in a few lines of code
• Works alongside Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite, Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and MCP integrations

Early Adopters Already Live:

• Browserbase: agents spin up headless browsers and pay per session
• PostalForm: agents pay to print and send physical mail
• Prospect Butcher Co.: agents order sandwiches for human pickup/delivery in NYC
• Stripe Climate: agents can programmatically contribute to carbon removal

The simultaneous Tempo mainnet launch adds a blockchain settlement layer specifically optimized for machine-to-machine payments, backed by Stripe and Paradigm. MPP is the first time a major payment processor has created a dedicated open standard for autonomous agent transactions.