First announced in September, Tempo, the payments-focused blockchain incubated by venture firm Paradigm ($12.7 billion AUM) and payments giant Stripe (valued at $159 billion), is finally going live.

The companies are also introducing the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open payment standard designed to enable AI agents to pay for products and services on their own, whether for access to data, computing power or software tools.

AI can already write code, manage schedules and even trade with minimal human involvement. But when it comes to making purchases online, it still runs into infrastructure built for people: creating accounts, entering card details, filling in billing information and, in some cases, verifying the transaction with a bank.

MPP is designed to remove that friction by giving AI agents and service providers a standardized way to exchange payment instructions directly. Say you have a coding assistant that needs extra computing power to run a test. It could now request access from a cloud provider, receive a quoted price, pay from its wallet and unlock the service automatically.

The popular prediction is that as AI agents become more capable, this kind of transaction will become far more common. Rather than large, occasional payments, agent-driven commerce is expected to primarily consist of smaller, faster and more frequent transactions. McKinsey estimates that by 2030, AI agents could mediate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion globally.

And that is exactly what Tempo and MPP are built for, Stripe and Paradigm argue.

They are not the first to market. Coinbase and Cloudflare introduced a similar payment standard for AI agents, called x402, last May. But most of the roughly $34 million in payments it has processed so far, according to data provider Artemis, have been in stablecoins.

Stripe and Paradigm are positioning their protocol from the outset as a broader framework supporting multiple forms of payment.

Programmable digital dollars with their always-on, near-instant settlement may be especially well suited to the small, high-frequency transactions AI agents are expected to generate. But cards still dominate global commerce and remain the default payment method for most businesses and consumers.

Visa has already extended MPP to enable card payments across its network, while Lightspark has adapted it for bitcoin payments over the Lightning Network. That means AI agents could also pay merchants using cards or BTC.

The larger challenge is adoption. An AI agent can only transact this way if the service on the other side has integrated the standard. Its architects say it had already been integrated into more than 100 services spanning model providers, developer tools, compute platforms and data vendors. Paradigm and Stripe’s partners for Tempo also include Anthropic, DoorDash, Mastercard, Nubank, OpenAI, Ramp, Revolut, Shopify and Standard Chartered.

© Forbes