MPP and Tempo force a multi-rail map
Tempo mainnet and Stripe’s MPP made it indefensible to cover only Coinbase x402. Incumbent payments firms now had an HTTP 402 story that settles into existing merchant balances.
2026-03
What happened
Tempo mainnet and Stripe’s MPP made it indefensible to cover only Coinbase x402. Incumbent payments firms now had an HTTP 402 story that settles into existing merchant balances.
Tempo mainnet ships with Stripe-coauthored Machine Payments Protocol
A payments chain plus an HTTP 402 protocol that is rail-agnostic across cards and stablecoins.
Stripe documents MPP as an internet-native way for agents to pay
PaymentIntents, Shared Payment Tokens and stablecoins without a checkout UI.
Agent wallets converge on stablecoins plus policy limits
Visa tokens, x402 USDC and MPP SPTs are different wrappers on the same control problem.
Agent commerce protocols proliferate beyond crypto-native stacks
Stripe ACP, Visa Intelligent Commerce, MPP and x402 now sit in one landscape.
Mastercard is named as a Tempo/MPP design partner for agent payments
Card-network participation in MPP is a distribution signal, not a live volume print.