Stripe, in collaboration with blockchain network Tempo and financial technology firm Morpho, has launched the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard designed to enable autonomous AI agents to make payments. The protocol, co-authored by Stripe and Tempo, was announced alongside a partnership with Morpho, which will power lending services on the Tempo network for both humans and machines.
The MPP allows AI agents to transact directly with online services without human intervention. When an agent requests a resource from an HTTP endpoint, the service responds with a payment request, which the agent can authorize, leading to the resource being delivered. Businesses using Stripe's PaymentIntents API can integrate MPP payments with just a few lines of code. Payments can be settled in stablecoins or traditional fiat methods, including cards and buy-now-pay-later options, using Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs). For existing Stripe merchants, these transactions are processed through the standard Dashboard with familiar features like tax calculation and fraud protection.
The protocol is already live with several businesses, including BrowserBase (charging for headless browser sessions), Postalform (for printing and sending physical mail), and Prospect Butcher Co. (for sandwich deliveries in New York City). Stripe frames this launch as part of a broader "Agentic Commerce Suite," which also includes the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and MCP integrations, aiming to build layered infrastructure for an agent-first commerce model.
Parag Agrawal, founder of p0, emphasized the shift, stating that platforms are being built for a world "where agents are the primary users of the web." The development, enabled via open RPC endpoints on the Tempo Mainnet, is positioned to have wide implications for e-commerce and decentralized finance (DeFi) by making machine-led transfers more common than human-led ones.
