Paradigm and Stripe launch Tempo mainnet: a payments-first blockchain for the agentic web

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Georgio,

what's going on?

How are you doing?

Good afternoon. Thank you for

Good afternoon.

Good to see you. Great to see you.

Uh, please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

So, I'm Georgios. I drive the engineering team at the Tempo project. Yeah,

Tempo is a payments first blockchain that we started developing in August. Um, today we just launched the Tempo mainet live in production.

Alongside it, we also launched the machine payments protocol,

which is our answer to how agents should pay.

Yeah.

And if you think about it, agents are great at searching the web. We use agents all the time in our development process. My AMP, Cloud Code, Codeex, whatever it is for developing, but we find it very hard to make them pay. So, we developed the solution for it. And I'm excited to talk about both.

So, you have MCP. A lot of people were saying like, why doesn't an MCP have uh payment uh a payment spec already baked into it? There's this whole debate about HTTP maybe having a payments back in it, 20 years ago or something. Um, MP solves that. But is MPP like a subset or a superset of MCP or is it a completely different spec? Is there any relationship between the two technologies?

They're complimentary. You should think of MCP as a way to talk to an API that has been designed to be baked into the agent harnesses. And MVP is a way that you can payment gate an MCP.

So imagine that you have your service, you have written an MCP for it, but you actually want to make that a paid service. Maybe for example on TBPN you guys do great prep for all the people that you work with. Hey, well what if you just added a paid API to that

sometimes.

Um awesome. So, so yeah, I think uh anybody that that hasn't been living under a data center has heard of the potential for agents to to use stable coins and and uh blockchain technology generally uh for various uh services. You guys are working with a bunch of really cool companies like what kind of use cases are you trying to guide your design partners towards enabling? I think the most exciting use case they have to do around commerce basically there's a lot of like very interesting work around hey I'm on chbttt my chbpt is browsing around but hey it wants to buy things for me and I think that's one of the things that is unlocking the other thing to think about is that your chat GPT is again browsing the web but it hits a payw wall you want it to be able to instead of saying hey I can access this information you wanted to instead be able to say actually pay 30 cents and us this wonderful article that would have been payw wall which might improve your research queries by 3% or something.

So so in that in that case you'd be going to people that do have paywalled content and try to get them to that. Is that the idea?

Totally. I think that would be awesome. Then the other thing is just h happening already is that again envision that these days also don't want to click buttons around they just want to tell they their again their AI app to them I think what we've been seeing ourselves as developers is instead of me going say cloudflare versel and saying hey login add billing information labs and say hey do me this text to speech thing or or any kind of like API gated services today. Instead, I can just say, "Hey, agent, here's five bucks. Go and figure it out for me." And actually, he doesn't just do it um in one service. It does it on many services. You can imagine a waterfall of queries can tell it, "Hey, go search the web, pull all this data, translate it with this API, then voice to speech it, text to speech it with some other API, and then upload it onto a website and email me that link of the website, all one shot." Mhm. Right.

Uh yeah, I was going to ask more on the on the technical side. There's been a lot of protocols created blockchains over the last, you know, decade. You've seen pretty much all of them. Uh I'm assuming this is your Mona Lisa, you know, taking all the different learnings from the different blockchains and trying to build uh the the perfect uh perfect uh product experience this time around. what kind of like technical decisions did did you and the team make uh for this kind of use case?

Yeah, so the Tempo blockchain is itself optimized for payments which means that it's really fast.

It has very high throughput and very low latency. Our block times are less than a second which means that you hit and before the spinner even finishes spinning you have a confirmation back which is what any normal person would expect from a payments experience. But in addition to these, the innovation that we've done on the MPP side is a feature called sessions where normally you would need to let's say you're talking to I don't know let's say again the open AI API and if you were to do payments if you were to pay for every query that you're doing you would need to wait for the blockchain to like confirm your transaction. you would need to pay a fee anytime you do your transaction and that these days maybe you can do 10,000 transactions per second or something but really for the agentic web and it does seem that everyone will be making a lot more API calls than they were doing before we need to scale up to hundreds of thousands millions if not you know billions of payments per second um just to put it the analogy would be that instead of thinking of like financial transactions we should be thinking about API calls per second so we all this feature called sessions which let you really go at API scale by bypassing the blockchain and thinking about it like going to a opening a tab where you say hey I'm opening my tab and then every time on your notebook on the side you write what are the updates and then only at the end when you want to settle do you pay which amortizes the cost of a very expensive otherwise operation if you want to do

you know a thousand or a million API requests just two the opening and the closing

yeah makes sense um what how how are you dealing with the just general perception that there's always a risk that AI hallucinate and so maybe you know you don't want to have an you don't want to give an agent uh the ability to go spend an unlimited amount of money maybe you want a transaction to be reversible there's this joke about like giving openclaw your uh your credit card That seems irresponsible, but in some ways I would maybe rather give a credit card to an agent than, you know, a crypto wallet that if it lead sends it to the wrong address, it's gone forever. It's not really reversible. How are you thinking about uh handling those like longtail errors that are that can be catastrophic?

That that's an awesome question because I absolutely have in the past lost money using systems that, you know, others had built where where you just give your agent money and then the agent goes and spends it without realizing how much access it has. Yeah, we developed a feature called access keys which basically is your standard card permissions. It's a bit more programmable, but you should think of it as limits, spend limits.

Um, and you can program that. So, whenever you open a a tempo session, you can just authorize the agent and say you can only spend up to 10 bucks. Or you can tell it, hey, you can only spend up to 10 bucks an hour or $1 a second. So it lets you have any kind of granularity on the assets that you're accessing that the functions that you can call or the API calls you can make and also on the frequency that these budgets can be applied.

Yeah. How do you think about uh getting the long tale of publishers onto some sort of aentic payment rail? because

hopefully they're already on Stripe otherwise they've been living under a data center.

Yes. I'm just thinking about like the actual

that's like that's to me that's like why when I saw the launch and heard about the pro uh the the project previously I was like okay Stripe already has

a long tale of merchants if they can easily enable MPP

then you're kind of able to kind of bootstrap a network.

Yeah. I'm just thinking like if you have a blog and you put adwords on it, you got a stream of payments from Google, whenever you would show a page, they'd show an ad, they'd auction that ad, they would send you maybe 50% of what they made on that ad, and that would be paid monthly, and they were able to onboard sort of the long tail. uh if you it feels like the the opportunity here is like this many to many relationship but I'm wondering about like is that onboarding going to happen on tempo directly is is that going to be decentralized or would we expect the big labs like open AAI anthropic to say okay now we have optin for anyone who wants to get paid when when one of our LLMs one of our agents hits your website and we will use tempo as the uh payment rail So there there's a few questions here. So

I think what you just said is true and will happen. It's already happening, right? So Enthropic or OpenAI or both already have a service where you plug in only to OpenAI and then you can just have a billing relationship with all of the integrated partners that they have. So that that will happen for sure.

On the Tempo side, the machine payments protocol, MPPP, which is what we launched this morning, it is co-built with Stripe. We co-authored it and it's payments method agnostic. So every merchant that is on Stripe and if you go to the Stripe docs, MPPP is already there and it's already an option you can enable.

Um, every merchant could turn that on and their API and their website could become MPPP enabled which would cover a part of that tail if not you know that part that you just said.

Sure. So is this a bet on model commoditization and local compute? Because if there's consolidation and the vast majority of LLM traffic is coming from like a single lab or two labs or three labs like the Wall Street Journal does get scraped by OpenAI, but they have a deal between OpenAI the corporation and News Corp the corporation and they sat down in a boardroom and they said, "Hey, this is the value. like send me the check and pay you know via invoice and it's a very different relationship but for these long tale if the long tale with Google can pay a ton of small bloggers who set up their own websites on whatever they can go to you know their own their own blog but is this is this maybe a solution to like if models commoditize and you're seeing LM traffic come from all different sources then you need your agent to go and make the payment

I think for the publisher use case. I think that's totally could be the case. The thing that we're the most excited about is the machine machine payments world and developers

right now every there's just a a tailwind right now where with AI more and more people are building things everybody wants to make paid APIs or everybody wants to monetize their knowledge base their API and these are just not things that it just means that the tail is just going to be so long that it's not something that I expect will be realistically captured by the labs in that way just because any random dev can spin up an API that could be very very very valuable. And I think that the lowest friction way to access and monetize that API will be via MPP on tempo.

Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. I I've I've run into this issue where I've gone to uh a particular LLM and said, I want you to uh take this video, convert it to an MP3, then transcribe it, then you know transform that. And it can do and it's like, oh, I need a tool for that. like why don't you download the file and they literally told me like open up QuickTime and turn it into an MP3. I was like no no no I want you to do that and if you Google it like you know MP4 or M4A2 transcript like there's a tool out there that does it. It's I don't know if it has an API. It probably should. There probably is an API out there for a lot of these things.

It might have malware in it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of them are like websites that have a million ads and stuff. It's way better. I I if it just came back to me and be and was like, "Hey, that's going to be 15 cents and I've already approved that or hey, it's going to be 50 bucks to do what you want because you asked me to go generate a whole bunch of AI video and crazy stuff and you know that was a big request. Is this in budget?" And I can be like, "Yeah, absolutely." Uh,

absolutely. And this is right now supported. There's the MPP services registry where if you literally go tell your agent, hey, build me an image, convert this to whatever you want. there are APIs already integrated which let you do all of these things without ever leaving your agent without getting every like AP you know install your own API tool thing. So totally

explain uh if I'm a developer and I'm using something like codeex and I want to like effectively enable the agent to buy different services with MPPP. what is the process for what is like the recommended process for like actually giving it funds everything on that side.

So this is the use case that we've been optimizing for. It is the exact use case because we're developers and we actually dog food this experience every day.

The process is extremely simple. You tell it install the tempo skill. The tempo skill is available on tempo website. You just paste the link in your agent and then once you tell it to install the tempo skill, the tempo skill bootstraps the whole process and says install the tempo command line interface from your codeex and then onboard the user. The user's browser opens, the user face IDs, and then or touch IDs if you're on your MacBook. And then the user just gets onboarded via Apple Pay if they have Apple if they have an Apple

or via another crypto if they have stable coins or we right now we provide some referral codes to make on boarding easier for people.

Very cool.

And then you're in then you're logged in and you can go crazy.

And then you could ask the agent like add more fun, you know, I need to add more funds.

Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. And so if you hit it if you hit some type of paywalled experience or paywalled API, it'll just tell you I need access to more funds and then you can just enable it. That's very cool.

Absolutely.

Amazing. Uh well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the launch. We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you.

Great to meet you. Have a good day.