Tempo Mainnet Is Live: Introducing the Machine Payments Protocol on Alchemy

Tempo Mainnet is officially live, and with it, a new open standard for how AI agents pay for services across the internet. Since supporting Tempo's public testnet in December, Alchemy has been working closely with the Tempo team to bring enterprise-grade infrastructure to the payments-native blockchain. Today, that partnership deepens with mainnet launch and full support for the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) — an open standard for machine payments co-authored by Stripe and Tempo.

What Is Tempo?

Backed by Stripe and Paradigm, and working with design partners including Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, DoorDash, and others, Tempo is a Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for real-world payments at internet scale. Unlike general-purpose chains that bolt on payment functionality, Tempo is architected from the ground up around the requirements of production payment systems: predictable fees, sub-second finality, high throughput, and dedicated payment lanes that guarantee blockspace for transfers even during network congestion. Tempo also ships with native account abstraction, a compliance-ready token standard (TIP-20), and the ability for users to pay transaction fees in stablecoins — removing the need to hold volatile gas tokens.

What Is MPP?

The Machine Payments Protocol is an open standard that defines how AI agents and automated services request, authorize, and settle payments programmatically. Instead of every service building its own billing integration, MPP provides a shared protocol layer that any agent or service can plug into. Here's how it works in practice: an agent requests a resource from a service, the service responds with a payment request, the agent authorizes payment from its wallet, the transaction settles instantly on Tempo, and the service delivers the resource. No human in the loop.

Sessions and Streaming Payments

One of MPP's most powerful primitives is sessions — persistent payment authorizations that let agents transact continuously within defined limits. An agent opens a session, sets aside funds upfront, and defines spending limits. As the agent consumes resources (API calls, model inferences, data queries), payments stream continuously without requiring a separate on-chain transaction for each interaction. Thousands of micro-transactions get aggregated into a single settlement, making true pay-per-use viable at scale. MPP also supports streams, enabling granular usage-based billing — down to a per-byte basis. This unlocks patterns like paying stablecoin tokens for LLM tokens, or stablecoin tokens for RPC data, with settlement happening through efficient one-way payment channels.

How Alchemy Powers Tempo

Alchemy provides Day 1 mainnet infrastructure for Tempo, just as we did for testnet. As the leading blockchain infrastructure provider processing over $4T+ in annual transactions with 99.99% uptime, Alchemy delivers the reliability that payment-grade applications demand. Our support for Tempo includes:

• Ultra-Reliable RPC Infrastructure: Enterprise-grade blockchain connectivity with global redundancy and 24/7 availability for mission-critical payment operations.
• Complete Protocol Coverage: Full support for Tempo's unique primitives including TIP-20 tokens, TempoTransactions, and payment lane features, with comprehensive API access across WebSockets, RPC, Trace, and Debug APIs.
• Developer Tools at Scale: Proven tooling for high-throughput payment workloads with observability and debugging capabilities, backed by 8+ years at enterprise scale.

Agents Can Now Pay for Alchemy via MPP

With MPP live on mainnet, AI agents can now autonomously access Alchemy's blockchain data APIs — including Core RPC APIs, Prices API, Portfolio API, and NFT API — and pay for them programmatically using stablecoins on Tempo. Agents can also purchase Alchemy credits using Stripe credit cards, giving builders flexibility regardless of how their agents are funded. This means an AI agent can query blockchain data, pay per call or per byte via MPP sessions, and never require a human to manually manage billing. It's infrastructure access as a native capability of the agent itself.

"Alchemy has been a critical infrastructure partner since day one. Their enterprise-grade support for MPP on Tempo reflects what reliable, payments-ready infrastructure looks like in the agentic economy."

— Nischay Upadhyayula, GTM, Tempo

What This Means for Builders

The rise of agentic commerce is creating entirely new payment patterns. A single AI workflow might involve dozens of small payments across different services — for compute, data, model inference, and more. MPP on Tempo provides the settlement layer for this new class of commerce, and Alchemy is the infrastructure making it reliable and accessible. Whether you're building AI agents that need to transact autonomously, payment applications that require predictable throughput, or embedded finance products on stablecoins — Tempo and Alchemy provide the foundation.

Get Started

• Explore MPP through the Machine Payments Protocol docs and SDKs.
• Start building on Alchemy: Sign up or contact sales to discuss your Tempo integration.