MPP Just Launched. Here's What It Means for AI Agent Developers (And Why AgentWallex Fits Perfectly)

This morning, Stripe and Tempo co-authored and launched the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) — an open standard for AI agent payments. Visa is backing it. The spec is live at mpp.dev, and there are already real production deployments processing payments. If you're building AI agents or infrastructure for them, this matters. Not because MPP is the "one true standard" (it's not), but because it represents a major validation of the agent payment infrastructure layer — and clarifies exactly where the market is headed. Let me break down what actually happened, how MPP fits with existing standards like x402, and what this means for developers building agents today. What MPP Actually Does MPP standardizes the request/response flow for AI agents paying for services. The protocol is surprisingly clean: Agent requests a resource (API call, compute session, physical service) Service returns a payment challenge (price, payment methods accepted, terms) Agent authorizes payment (crypto or traditional