Stripe-backed crypto startup Tempo releases AI payments protocol, launches blockchain
· Fortune
The fintech giant Stripe along with Tempo, a blockchain startup incubated by the payments company as well as the venture firm Paradigm, launched a new payments protocol on Wednesday to make it easier for AI actors to send and receive money. Dubbed the “Machine Payments Protocol,” the open-source network supports payments in both fiat and cryptocurrency. The protocol is also compatible with Stripe’s existing AI payments infrastructure.
While the new AI payments network currently runs only on top of Tempo, which is also the name of the blockchain developed by the Stripe-backed startup, it’s designed to operate across multiple blockchains and payments rails, not just one. On Wednesday, Tempo simultaneously announced that its blockchain went live after operating in a test phase over the past three-and-a-half months.
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“Agentic payments is very early, and we still are figuring out the best way to structure these,” Matt Huang, cofounder of Tempo and managing partner at Paradigm, told Fortune. “So our team just came up with what we thought was the most elegant, minimal, efficient protocol that anyone can extend without our permission.”
Agentic AI
Agentic payments has become the newest buzzphrase in fintech. The concept refers to when AI agents, or autonomous bots, send and receive money on behalf of their human users. The arena is nascent, but technologists envision a future where agents are crawling the web and paying each other to access news articles, buy products from Amazon, or download a dataset.
Tempo, which raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in 2025 from Silicon Valley heavyweights like Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital, has positioned itself to ride this new wave of commerce. The startup’s blockchain is designed for high-speed payments and stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar.
The protocol Tempo designed with Stripe isn’t the only existing framework for agentic payments. Coinbase has also designed its own network, which it dubbed x402, a callback to a message encoded by early internet pioneers that returned a 402, or “Payment Required,” error. And Google released a new payments scheme in September that includes support for credit cards as well as stablecoins.
The payments giant Visa also contributed to Stripe and Tempo’s “Machine Payments Protocol,” developing the specifications for letting agents pay with credit or debit cards. “We look at MPP as another way that you can have a very clear, defined protocol around how an agent communicates with merchants,” Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, told Fortune.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com