Tempo Mainnet: The Race to Agentic Commerce

**David** (0:02)
Bankless Station, I'm here with Georgios Konstantopoulos. He's an engineer at Tempo, and also joined with him is Brendan Ryan, another engineer at Tempo. Brendan, Georgios, welcome to Bankless.

**Georgios Konstantopoulos** (0:12)
Good to be with you guys. Big day.

**Brendan Ryan** (0:14)
Thank you. Yes.

**David** (0:15)
So congrats on the Tempo launch. What is, I want to know what just like the launch actually looks like, you know, day one, or just in the near term, the short term. What are some of the first movers that are coming online? And then also just like kind of the first categories of activities that's happening on Tempo. What is this like the launch kind of look like?

**Georgios Konstantopoulos** (0:33)
We've been building Tempo since August with a lot of wonderful partners. We're working with Stripe on this. The goal is to make stable coins and web scale payments to work finally using a lot of crypto blockchain technology that we've been building over the last few years. Today's launch is focused on AI agents using the machine payments protocol to pay for things on the web autonomously. We're continuing to push on our work on the enterprise work streams around cross-border payments, remittances, and things which really are truly what attracted us to the crypto world in the first place, 24-7 borderless finance and payments. There's more to come on that in the next few weeks, and we'll continue sharing on that, but today's launch was all about the agentic payments.

**David** (1:18)
All about agentic payments. Well, I mean, there's Mainnet, right? But I did notice that there is just like a very large emphasis on this MPP thing, which I think we'll go into. Tempo is known in the crypto industry as like you guys do stable coins, you guys talk about remittances, tokenized deposits. If somebody wants a stable coin, they might go to Stripe and Tempo and get a stable coin minted on Tempo. But it really seems like that wasn't really the focus of today's Mainnet launch.
The emphasis is on this machine payments protocol MPP, which I think gets us into the topic of agentic commerce. That's what I'm reading into, that's what you just said. Why the focus on agentic commerce as a primary part of the actual Mainnet launch?

**Georgios Konstantopoulos** (2:05)
The Mainnet as it launched today supports all the use cases that you mentioned. We already have some flows live on it, which are for a particular normal payments. For example, Bridge has already, Bridge, the SHIPE company, has already gotten some funds on Tempo, and we're working on further expanding support for that. So this continues to be a lot of the focus. At the same time, the AI payments world seems to be happening, so all of our people on the team, we use Cloud, AMP, Codex all day, and we're already seeing that even to us as developers, it's kind of too much to go and log in to a service, auth, add card, get API key, put that API key back. It's just too much when we're just super charged with these new tools. So this really came out of our own need, in a way, for, okay, guys, it looks like this AI agents want to do more, but they're not able to. They get bottlenecked on the human. Or just to give you another example, let's say I have my deep research agent and I'm browsing around. It can many times just improve its quality of response if you had access to some piece of content that was paywalled, for example, New York Times article or anything else. So we just thought, hey, what if we didn't have to do anything around that? And what if we just gave the agent the wallet and we just let it rip? And we really went with that thesis that, okay, we have the enterprise stable coins things. These are very important. We should continue doing them, but we cannot ignore this wave that's coming, this tailwind about which could affect materially the focus for everyone in the crypto payments industry. And as a result, we decided to really put a lot of energy, make the launch, be focused on this, and then continue with the rest of our work because it was just too important to not make a move on this.

**Ryan** (3:57)
We've already mentioned something called MPP. Can you describe what that is? And how is that different from other agentic payment standards that we've seen something like X402?

**Brendan Ryan** (4:06)
MPP or Machine Payments Protocol is an open and payment method agnostic protocol for machine to machine payments. And I think the best way to think about it is it is like the payment form for agents. So today, I think all of us are very familiar with going on a page, you see kind of a standard payment form, it's all the same layout, but you can plug in hundreds of payment methods into that, if it's cards, Klarna, even Payment of Crypto, all of that plugs into that. And it's humans are used to that UX, it's very efficient. But if you expand that, and I think this is why we are so interested at Tempo about machine to machine payments is we just see it at a huge velocity and a huge compounding number, month over month growth. So we think as that velocity increases, you just need more efficient interfaces. So MPP is we view as a payment method interface, which agents can interact with really, really efficiently. We've done a bunch of benchmarks to make sure this is true and allows them to transmit payments over multiple payment methods seamlessly in HTTP requests. So we just see this today, a lot of API services, people ordering sandwiches today, you can use it in MCP servers, but you can also use it even for if you just wanted to host a video or some content, kind of this classical micro payments for content use case that people have been talking about since the nineties, but really hasn't been feasible just because of the interface it's exposed to. And people thought about it at the time, the status code was created in the core HTTP spec, but never really formalized. And we think NDP is the formalization of it. And we have designed it in such a way that is entirely neutral. Payment method currency agnostic works with web standards. And we actually submitted it to the IETF this morning in order to be the true spec for 402 And we think it's the best chance for a totally neutral approach.