Tempo Mainnet is live

Date
Time 4 min
Author Tempo
Announcement

We’re excited to share that Tempo Mainnet is live!

Tempo is infrastructure for real-world payments at internet scale. It’s designed for instant settlement, predictable low fees, high throughput, and global availability. Starting today, you can build on Tempo through our public RPC endpoints.

Start building →

Alongside mainnet, we’re also introducing the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard for machine payments co-authored by Stripe and Tempo. More below.

When we first announced Tempo in September, our premise was simple: if stablecoins become a core layer of internet commerce, the infrastructure that moves money needs to be purpose-built for payments.

Stablecoins make it possible to move value across borders with instant settlement and continuous availability. But most existing blockchains were not designed for large-scale payment workloads. Fees fluctuate, throughput is limited, and transaction structures are poorly suited to common payment flows.

Unlike other blockchains, Tempo was designed around the requirements of real payment systems: predictable costs, high throughput, and reliable settlement for large volumes of transactions.

Over the past several months, a new class of applications has started to make those requirements much more visible:

The rise of agentic payments

Agents can already write code, coordinate services, retrieve data, and execute complex workflows across the internet. But as these systems become more capable, they increasingly need to transact.

A research agent may pay for access to a dataset. A development agent may purchase compute or testing infrastructure. A workflow agent might coordinate several services, paying each one as it completes a task.

In these environments, payments become continuous and programmatic. Instead of a single transaction between two parties, a single workflow may involve dozens or hundreds of small payments across different services.

This pattern quickly exposes the limitations of existing payment rails.

Traditional payment systems assume human-initiated transactions and manual approval flows. Many blockchains, meanwhile, were not designed for high-frequency, low-value transactions where predictable costs and reliability matter most.

Tempo provides the settlement infrastructure for this scale of interactions, allowing agents to transact programmatically.

Introducing the Machine Payments Protocol

Machine Payments Protocol Thumbnail

To build these foundations, we’re releasing the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard for machine payments. MPP is designed to be extensible and agnostic to any payment method, already working with stablecoins, cards, and more supported payment methods.

MPP provides a standard way for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically. Instead of each service inventing its own billing flow, MPP defines a simple protocol for requesting, authorizing, and settling payments between machines.

We decided to launch MPP as an open standard so that machine payments can work consistently across services and payment rails.

MPP runs on Tempo today, but the protocol itself is designed to be rail-agnostic and extensible. For example, our design partner Visa has already extended MPP to support card-based payments on their network. Stripe has extended it to support cards, wallets, and other payment methods through their platform. Lightspark has also extended it for Bitcoin payments over the Lightning network.

Sessions for streaming payments

How MPP Sessions Work

MPP lets an agent pay for services autonomously: an agent can request a resource from a service, and the service responds with a payment request. The agent then authorizes payment from its wallet, the transaction settles instantly, and the service delivers the requested resource to the agent.

This is made possible with a new primitive called sessions, which allows for continuous payments. Think of it as OAuth for money: authorize once, then allow payments to execute programmatically within defined limits.

When an agent opens a session, it sets aside funds upfront. As the agent consumes resources from services (an API call, a model inference, a data query, etc.), payments stream continuously without requiring a separate onchain transaction for each interaction.

Thousands of small transactions can be aggregated into a single settlement transaction, making true pay-per-use payments viable at internet scale.

Payments directory

MPP Payments Directory

Our new payments directory provides a unified catalog of MPP-compatible services that any agent can transact with automatically. 

Service providers can integrate to monetize their service and become discoverable to agents as well. MPP enables a variety of use cases, including pay-per-call APIs, monetized MCP servers, gated content and data, multi-service workflows, and much more. 

At launch, the payments directory already includes integrations with more than 100 services spanning model providers, developer infrastructure, compute platforms, and data services, including Alchemy, Dune Analytics, Merit Systems, and Parallel Web Systems.

Infrastructure for payments at scale

While agents represent a new class of commerce emerging on Tempo, we’ve architected the infrastructure to support established payment flows such as global payouts, cross-border remittances, embedded finance, and tokenized deposits, which remain surprisingly cumbersome to build and operate today.

Since launching the public testnet in December, we’ve been working with design partners across payments, commerce, and financial services to bring real payment workloads onto stablecoins:

  • Global payouts: Platforms distributing payments to workers, sellers, and creators often process millions of disbursements at once. These systems require predictable costs and reliable throughput. Tempo’s dedicated payment lanes allow large payout runs to settle instantly without congestion or fee spikes.
  • Cross-border remittances: International transfers today often move through several intermediaries and settle over multiple days. Partners are testing remittance corridors on Tempo that settle in seconds with full auditability and predictable costs.
  • Embedded finance: Software companies increasingly embed payment flows directly into their applications. Tempo’s smart accounts and protocol-level memos allow developers to integrate financial workflows directly into products without building separate ledger infrastructure.
  • Tokenized deposits: Financial institutions are exploring tokenized representations of deposits and other assets that can settle continuously rather than within traditional banking hours. Tempo provides reconciliation primitives and compliance registries that mirror traditional financial controls while enabling real-time settlement.

We’re working with partners including Anthropic, DoorDash, Mastercard, Nubank, OpenAI, Ramp, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa to bring these use cases onto mainnet. We’ll also be introducing additional features designed specifically to support enterprise payment workloads, and we’ll have more to share in the coming months.

Start building on Tempo


Tempo Mainnet is live today.

Developers building agents can start using MPP to let agents pay for services. Fund an agent wallet, define spending limits, and allow your agents to transact autonomously across the internet.

Builders working on global payment systems can use Tempo’s infrastructure for high-throughput settlement, cross-border transfers, and embedded financial workflows.

You can get started in a few ways: