Make Agentic Payments

Make agentic payments using the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP). MPP adds inline payments to any HTTP endpoint — agents, apps, or humans pay as part of their request, and the server verifies payment before returning the response.

Try an agentic payment

See the full payment flow in action. The terminal creates an ephemeral wallet, funds it with testnet USDG, and makes a paid request to fetch a photo.

Press Enter or click to start

MPP payment flow

A client requests a paid resource, the server responds with 402 and a Challenge describing the price. The client pays, retries with a Credential transaction, and the server returns the resource with a Receipt.

Request — Any HTTP method (GET, POST, etc.)
Challenge — 402 with WWW-Authenticate: Payment header describing amount, currency, and recipient
Pay — Client signs a transaction or fulfills payment off-chain
Retry — Client re-sends with Authorization: Payment header containing the Credential
Deliver — Server verifies, returns 200 with Payment-Receipt header

Why Tempo for agentic payments

Tempo's transaction model is designed for agentic payments using MPP:

~500ms finality — Deterministic confirmation fast enough for synchronous request/response flows
Sub-cent fees — Low enough for micropayments and per-request billing
Lower repeated channel lifecycle costs — T7 adds payer-scoped storage credits for MPP payment channels. The credited reopen path, open_new_channel_with_storage_credit, is 60,225 gas in the channel-reserve gas snapshot.
Fee sponsorship — Servers can cover gas on behalf of clients so they only need stablecoins
2D and expiring nonces — Parallel nonce lanes prevent payment transactions from blocking other account activity
High throughput — Supports the on-chain settlement volume that payment channels generate at scale

MPP payment intents on Tempo

Two intents are available on Tempo:

	Charge	Session
Pattern	One-time payment per request	Continuous pay-as-you-go
Latency	~500ms (on-chain confirmation)	Near-zero (off-chain vouchers)
Best for	Single API calls, content access, one-off purchases	LLM APIs, metered services, usage-based billing
On-chain cost	Per request	Amortized across many requests

Agentic payment use cases

Paid APIs — Charge per request without API keys, billing accounts, or signup flows.
MCP tools — Monetize tool calls served through the Model Context Protocol. Agents pay per call without OAuth or account setup.
Digital content — Charge per access for articles, data feeds, or media without subscription paywalls.

Get started with MPP on Tempo

Client quickstart

Handle payment-gated resources automatically

Agent quickstart

Discover services and make paid requests from a terminal or AI agent

Discover MPP services

Find paid APIs through the mpp.dev directory, catalog API, and MCP server

Server quickstart

Add payment gating to your HTTP endpoints

Accept one-time payments

Charge per request with on-chain settlement

Accept pay-as-you-go payments

Session-based billing with off-chain vouchers

MPP SDKs and tools

Tool	Package	Install
CLI	`tempo request`	`curl -fsSL https://tempo.xyz/install \| bash`
TypeScript	`mppx`	`npm install mppx viem`
Python	`pympp`	`pip install pympp`
Rust	`mpp-rs`	`cargo add mpp`

See the full SDK documentation for API reference and advanced usage.

Learn more about MPP

MPP documentation — Full protocol docs, SDK reference, and guides
IETF specs — Normative protocol specification
Protocol overview — Challenges, Credentials, Receipts, and transports

Was this helpful?

Suggest changes to this page