Introducing the Machine Payments Protocol

Agents need a payment layer built for machines

AI is shifting from conversational chatbots to autonomous agents capable of planning, executing, and evaluating multi-step tasks. As these agents take on real work across the internet economy, they need a way to transact that doesn't require human-style account creation, subscription selection, or manual billing steps—actions that often stall agent workflows entirely.

The Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), co-authored by Tempo and Stripe, is an open standard designed to fill that gap. MPP specifies how agents and services can coordinate payments programmatically, which opens the door to microtransactions, recurring billing, and other payment patterns that would otherwise require human intervention.

For Stripe users, accepting payments over MPP takes just a few lines of code using the PaymentIntents API. That means businesses can take payments directly from agents in stablecoins or fiat via cards and buy-now-pay-later methods, routed through Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs).

Early adopters are already running agentic business models on the protocol. Browserbase lets agents spin up headless browsers and pay per session. PostalForm enables agents to pay for printing and physical mail delivery. Prospect Butcher Co. takes orders from agents for sandwiches with human pickup or delivery anywhere in New York City. Agents can now also make programmatic contributions to Stripe Climate.

“Parallel is built for a world where agents are the primary users of the web. We integrated machine payments with Stripe in just a few lines of code, and now agents can autonomously pay per API call for web access. This allows us to reach any agent developer in the world on the same Stripe stack we already run on,” said Parag Agrawal, founder of Parallel Web Systems.

How the payment flow works

The protocol’s core loop is straightforward. An agent requests a resource from any HTTP-addressable service, API, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) endpoint. The service replies with a payment request. The agent authorizes payment, and the resource is delivered.

From the business’s perspective, MPP payments land in the Stripe API and Dashboard like any other transaction. Funds settle into the existing balance in the default currency on the standard payout schedule. That means the same Stripe infrastructure used for human payments—tax calculation, fraud protection, reporting, accounting integrations, refunds—works unchanged for agent-originated payments.

On the code side, creating a crypto payment intent over MPP requires minimal setup:

const paymentIntent = await stripe.paymentIntents.create({ amount: 1, currency: 'usd', payment_method_types: ['crypto'], payment_method_data: { type: 'crypto', }, payment_method_options: { crypto: { mode: 'deposit', deposit_options: { networks: ['tempo'], }, }, }, confirm: true, });

  

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Infrastructure for the agent economy

MPP is one piece of a broader push by Stripe to build financial infrastructure for agent-driven commerce. The company’s Agentic Commerce Suite, the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), MCP integrations, and support for both MPP and x402 together aim to cover the payment patterns agents actually need as a new category of users.

Businesses looking to start accepting MPP payments via Stripe can find implementation guidance in the docs.