x402 vs MPP: Almost Honest Comparison

Lately, machine payments and HTTP 402-based solutions have been gaining traction and hype. If you ignore all the AI agent buzz and look at this as just payments, the idea is pretty simple: a user (or agent) has a wallet with a balance (crypto or fiat — doesn’t matter) they pay for actual usage (a request to a service), not for a subscription services become easier to access and try A simple example: today: 5 subscriptions at $20 → that’s just 5 services, and: you have to register and subscribe in some cases create API keys or deal with auth breaking you might not even use the full subscription value with pay-per-request machine payments: you can spend $0.5 on 1–2 requests and decide if you need the service use a service for $3–5 instead of a full subscription try and use more different services overall This changes the UX quite a lot. And this is where two different approaches come in: x402 from Coinbase and MPP (Machine Payment Protocol) from Stripe and Tempo. Both protocols are solid