Chapter 1: What is the significance of the Tempo Mainnet launch?
Bankless Nation, I'm here with Georgios Konstantopoulos. He's an engineer at Tempo and also joined with him is Brendan Ryan, another engineer at Tempo. Brendan, Georgios, welcome to Bankless. Good to be with you guys. Big day. Thank you. Yes. So congrats on the Tempo launch. I want to know what the launch actually looks like, day one or just in the near term, the short term.
What are some of the first movers that are coming online? And then also just like kind of the first categories of activities that's happening on Tempo. What does just like the launch kind of look like? We've been building Tempo since August with a lot of wonderful partners. We're working with Stripe on this.
The goal is to make stable coins and web scale payments to work finally using a lot of crypto blockchain technology that we've been building over the last few years. Today's launch is focused on AI agents using the machine payments protocol to pay for things on the web autonomously.
And we're continuing to push on our work on the enterprise work streams around cross-border payments, remittances, and things which really are truly what attracted us to the crypto world in the first place. 24-7 borderless finance and payments.
Chapter 2: Why is the focus on agentic payments for AI agents?
So there's more to come on that in the next few weeks, and we'll continue sharing on that. But today's launch was all about the agentic payments. All about agentic payments. Well, I mean, there's main net, right? But I did notice that there is just like a very large emphasis on this MPP thing, which I think we'll go into. Tempo is known in the crypto industry is like you guys do stable coins.
You guys talk about remittances, tokenized deposits. If somebody wants a stable coin, they might go to Stripe and Tempo and get a stable coin minted on Tempo. But it really seems like that wasn't really the focus of today's mainnet launch. Really, the focus, the emphasis is on this machine payments protocol, MPP, which I think kind of gets us into the topic of agentic commerce.
That's what I'm reading into. That's what you just said. Why the focus on agentic commerce as like a primary, just like part of the actual mainnet launch? The mainnet as it launched today supports all the use cases that you mentioned. So we already have some flows live on it, which are for particular normal payments. For example, Bridge, the Stripe company has already gotten
some funds on Tempo, and we're working on further expanding support for that. So this continues to be a lot of the focus. At the same time, the AI payments world seems to be happening. So all of our people on the team, we use Cloud, AMP,
Codex all day and we're already seeing that even to us as developers, it's kind of too much to go and log into a service, auth, add card, get API key, put that API key back. It's just too much when we're just super charged with these new tools. So this really came out of our own
need in a way for okay guys it looks like this AI agents want to do more but they're not able to they get bottlenecked on the human or just to give you another example let's say I have my deep research agent and I'm browsing around it can many times just improve its quality of response if you had access to some piece of content that was paywalled
for example, New York Times article or anything else. So we just thought, hey, what if we didn't have to do anything around that? And what if we just gave the agent a wallet and we just let it rip? And we really went with that thesis that, okay, we have the enterprise stable coins things. These are very important. We should continue doing them.
But we cannot ignore this wave that's coming, this tailwind about which could affect materially the focus for everyone in the crypto payments industry. And as it was, we decided to really put a lot of energy, make the launch, be focused on this and then continue with the rest of our work because it was just too important to not make a move on this. We've already mentioned something called MPP.
Can you describe what that is and how is that different from other agentic payment standards that we've seen, something like X402? MPP or machine payments protocol is a open and payment method agnostic protocol for machine to machine payments. And I think the best way to think about it is it is like the payment form for agents, right?
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Chapter 3: What is MPP and how does it differ from x402?
And humans are used to that UX. It's very efficient. But if you expand that, and I think this is why we are so interested at Tempo about machine-to-machine payments is we just see it at a huge velocity and a huge compounding number, month-over-month growth. So we think as that velocity increases, you just need more efficient interfaces. So MPP is, we view as a payment method interface interface
which agents can interact with really, really efficiently. We've done a bunch of benchmarks to make sure this is true and allows them to transmit payments over multiple payment methods seamlessly in HTTP requests. So we see this today, a lot of API services, people ordering sandwiches today.
You can use it in MCP servers, but you can also use it even for if you just wanted to host a video or host some content, kind of this feature classical micro payments for content use case that people have been talking about since the 90s, but really hasn't been feasible just because of the interface it's exposed in. And people thought about it at the time.
The status code was created in the core HTTP spec, but never really formalized. And we think MPP is the formalization of it. And we have designed it in such a way that is entirely neutral. Payment method currency agnostic works with web standards. And we actually submitted it to the IETF this morning. in order to be the true spec for 402.
And we think it's the best chance for a totally neutral approach. Wait, be the spec for 402. I guess maybe the question is, so we've definitely heard this story before and we're excited about it, but we've heard it more in the context of another emerging standard, which is X402. Coinbase is championing that. Cloudflare has been behind it.
I also thought somewhere in the world like Stripe was involved as well. Just to be clear, is this like a competing standard to that or is it some sort of superset? Like how is it similar versus different? How much is it competitive with X402 versus collaborative? What does it look like in contrast to X402?
With regards to the Cloudflare and Stripe component, Cloudflare and Stripe are both companies that are on the record that they want to be neutral and want to be supporting all of the systems. So today, Stripe has support for both MPP and 4x402. Cloudflare, the same Cloudflare also this morning, added an MPP proxy GitHub repo where you can use to make any service MPP enabled.
So from their perspective, all these platforms, they will just adopt everything and they will allow their users to choose what they want to choose based on other reasons that the protocol to differentiate on. Now, how do they actually differentiate on? I think it's three reasons. One is performance. Two is developer ergonomics. Three is platform support. And let me unpack them.
With regards to developer ergonomics, David, Ryan, we've been in many podcasts like this together. Our team is a team that shipped the Foundry project, which is the thing that powers all of the $100 billion in DeFi that has existed over time. We know how to build, how to test developer tools for backend developers.
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Chapter 4: Why does agentic commerce matter in today's digital economy?
So MPP could be a superset and you say it's more broad. When you say it's more broad, I noticed like Visa integrating it, for example. So it's not just stablecoin smart contract types of payments. It's also some of the traditional type payments. Is that what you mean by more broad? Like, you know, works with a Visa card? Absolutely.
And Ryan, to be clear, I want to steel man the X402 side, which there is a blog about X402 V2, which specifies that, okay, it will be more payments method agnostic and so on. That's fantastic. But what we have right now is live and it works with and it works already with a bunch of other methods.
The methods that we support right now are on Temple, which supports both one-time charge payments and sessions, which we should talk about in a second. We support Stripe, where the interesting thing on Stripe, and Brendan used to be at Stripe, so he can say more about how that works, is that it works with anything that Stripe supports. So we could be doing Klarna over MPP to do payments.
It supports Visa cards, so Visa wrote an extension to MPP. And we also have Bitcoin Lightning support, which I think is just remarkable that we spoke to the Spark team. We just gave them the spec and same day or the next day they had proof of concept repository extension, the spec, just one shot. Of course, their agents did a lot of work, but I think that was just remarkable.
And it just showed how easy this thing is to extend. So may the best standard win. I guess that's where we are right now. Can MPP be exported to other chains besides Tempo, other EVM chains? Absolutely. And again, we just didn't have time to do, you know, integration games are just so hard because somebody will always say, hey, you didn't do my integration. So of course, yes, it can.
And we want to do it. I actually think I have a pull request draft up about that, or maybe it's a thread request. in our agent. But yeah, it works because it's just call API, get response back, respond back with a signed transaction. This works everywhere.
The thing that works nicer on Tempo is that you can pay fees in any stable coin, for example, without having to do more work just because the chain supports it natively. But yeah, of course it works anywhere because what is an agentic payment? Just a signed payload that says, hey, transfer five bucks to Ryan. Absolutely, it works anywhere.
And even the sessions things that we're going to talk about in a second also works anywhere. So because it's just a smart contract that can be deployed anywhere and we've known how to do these things for many years. But yeah, it can be deployed on any chain. It can be deployed on EVM, SVM, whatever you want. We started with the Tempo transactions because that's what we're working on.
We're not going to do everyone's integration work up front, but we do want to expand it to more things. So whoever wants to work with us, Feel free. We'll be right back. When gold is reacting to global risk, crypto is moving on liquidity, and macro headlines can shift markets overnight. You need a platform that keeps everything in one place. This is BitGet's universal exchange vision in action.
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Chapter 5: What is the ‘original sin’ of the internet according to the guests?
And also receive money too. Yeah, like send and receive. Can you just kind of illuminate, illustrate, expand on just like the agentic commerce side of this story, which is the thing that I think the AI arms race is really focused on right now, is like trying to unlock that part of the agent tech tree. When we do unlock that, which is seemingly being unlocked, what comes out of that?
Like how big of a deal is like agentic commerce broadly in your mind? I think it's huge. Why? So think about it. Like I use my agent to do things more than I click around in Chrome, Brave, whatever. That in itself means that I want to make bookings. I want to buy things. I want to do, you know, all sorts of web crawling off into various services.
Like people in our Slack, they want to use, for example, 11 labs. But to them, even the friction of like going to log into the service and like get you know, billing set up, it's kind of painful. They just don't have, you know, the attention span or the patience to like try out new things. Why? Because we're just in a world where like, we move fast. The world moves fast these days.
Yeah, and so people just have low patience to do things. And so while they're trained now to be doing things in their agents, what this means is that they want their agents to be equipped with money and such that their agents can then go and do payments on the web for that. So for sure, I think this makes sense from the user side.
Now from the seller side, and I think David or Ryan, you guys interacted with like this Ben Thompson blog that I shared the other day. Stratechery. Yeah. Yeah, where the insight there for the seller side is that basically as a seller, your website has to become an API ASAP, not just a UI. Why?
Because you want it to be served to the agent in the best way possible, such that they go and buy things from you. Why? Because the user isn't going to go and click around. It's going to be a machine making payments to another machine, hence the name.
And so in these cases, like Ben makes a very interesting case about ads, which I don't know if that will play out or not, because there's many ways this can play out. But he says, hey, if like way less people are browsing the web with their eyes, then way less people are going to be converting from ads.
And maybe that means that this forces all of the sellers or of the people running websites to actually switch to paid APIs. Why? Because, well, they need to monetize somehow. This is already the case, by the way, on Cloudflare, where Cloudflare is adding like methods on their endpoints to like fend off the bots.
I think there's something more beautiful here, which could be, hey, just embrace the bots, just browsing and like dosing the web and just say, hey, to get through this, just pay me. And so I think there's just like such a strong tailwind to agentic payments that just wasn't there, frankly, last year. where you just give five bucks to your agent.
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Chapter 6: How does Tempo’s wallet security work for AI agents?
How do I translate things like reputation? How do you track that across? And we don't intend... MPP and we intentionally designed it where we're not going to try and jam all these things together. We want to compose with, just as we compose with multiple different payment methods by design, we're going to compose with multiple components of what are other things that people
and machines need to do and are useful. So we see a bunch of identity proliferation. There's a lot of different standards for discovery, et cetera. And we want to work with as many of those as possible. And that's why we designed the protocol to be simple as possible and as neutral as possible, because it's a massive tail point towards doing this.
Bernard is too humble to share this, but he has also written a great discovery proposal for MPP co-authored with the Merit Systems team, which are good friends of ours and we remember it closely. And the idea is that every MPP service can define its schema via, again, very well-known, literally, there's a dot well-known path that is a well-established web standard thing.
to be discovered by services. We're not building a search engine ourselves, but we're just building the ways for people to plug into their own search engines. The MPP libraries, they support MCP, or you can just call them over a standard rest. So again, it's not prescriptive about these things. These are just layers on top. And there's other things, for example,
There's UCP, I forget the acronym, by Shopify. There's A2A by Google. There's AP2. There's a bunch of things and they all do different things, but none of them really nails the pay angle. So we've made it so that you can do the payments based on the things that we talked about earlier, and then you can compose it however you want with whatever is on top.
What I hear there is that you guys don't have an opinion about the direction of the internet. If the Ben Thompson, Elliot outcome of just like, you know, there's just your AI and it renders the internet for you to visually appeal to how you like it, maybe that's great. Maybe natural forces point us that way. Maybe the MPP or agentic payments is like a very important puzzle piece to get us there.
But you guys are unopinionated about where it goes after this. I think it's hard to draw a specific long-term bet. I think when we look at the structural trends, there is just going to be more things. You see on GitHub more code being generated than ever before. There are more services going live on Stripe than ever before.
There are more people just building things and building things that produce valuable work. And... We think that those things should accrue value because they're providing value. So that's really the purpose of payments. You just think there's going to be more things. They're going to proliferate. They're going to get built faster.
And that very much is why we're excited about Tempo and especially machine payments at Tempo is... Because it draws to the natural conclusion of like, okay, what is the fastest way to get started today as a developer? Spin up a service, start monetizing it and provide value and get discovered. We think that is MPP and specifically MPP on tempo today because you don't need to touch anything.
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Chapter 7: What are the advantages of building an L1 versus an Ethereum L2?
It's a self-custodial wallet. It doesn't use any third party. It uses passkeys, which lets you... So in Tempo, we have added a native passkey type. If you have seen all of the account abstraction wallets in the Ethereum world, they all have this feature, but it always requires an extra component called a bundler, a relayer, whatever you want to call it.
Whereas in Tempo, we pulled that in in the Tempo transaction format, which we have published about, which means that you can use passkeys without an intermediary to go and transact with the chain. And this passkey is stored on your device, and it's also, if you're using iCloud Keychain or if you're using 1Password, you can also sync it across devices. Okay, cool.
All right, now I feel like we need to go back to Tempo and the thing that was launched. And we've done episodes on Tempo before, so Bankless listeners may be somewhat familiar, but I think we need a refresh here. So this is what? This is a layer one. It is EVM. I'm sure the Reth client is involved somewhere, Georgios, knowing you.
Can you just lay out the specs of this thing and what it is and kind of throughput? What assets are on it? Just kind of some of the details that somebody from the crypto world would want to know. Tempo is a layer one blockchain focused on payments. We're making opinionated trade-offs to optimize for the payments use case.
Tempo is permissionless, meaning that anybody can run a node and anybody can validate the state transitions of the chain. Tempo is live with 11 validators. Most are operated right now by Tempo and we have some externals running and we're onboarding more validators on this in the next few weeks. Externals from a geo-distributed cluster so that we have in Europe, US and so on.
So it's permissionless to run a node, but you are onboarding more validators. How do you square those two things? It's permissionless to run it. Imagine that you're Alchemy, for example. You can just run a node and like serve RPC traffic or you're an indexer like Alum and you want to like index the chain.
Or just a normal cypherpunk user that wants to not trust and verify everything, running a node is a two-command process. So everyone has the ability to listen to Tempo, but not everyone has the ability to write to Tempo. Is that correct? No, it's similar to in Ethereum. Like to become a validator, you need to stake 32 ETH. Right. We don't have that, and everything else is the same.
It means that anybody can run a normal node, anybody can submit transactions, anybody can create a wallet. There's no special casing, no blacklists anywhere. But running a validator is still permissioned in Temporal. Running a validator is still permissioned. We're in the early days. We're still figuring out what the right way to expand this validator set is.
I think we have a pretty promising roadmap in the next few weeks, but we need to be very thoughtful about how to execute. And there's 11 right now validators that are running. Right now there's 11. And we don't have a dashboard yet on the block explorer. We need to like make that happen.
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Chapter 8: How can developers leverage Tempo for new opportunities?
Like Georgios among them, originally the Loom L2, like scaling Ethereum, Liam Horn, who I mentioned, Dan Robinson, who pioneered Uniswap and a lot, even Dankrad this morning, he tweeted about Tempo, right? Now he's on the Tempo team. So these are kind of some of the crypto native heroes on this crops type mission, right? Censorship resistance, open source, private and secure, the Ethereum track.
And now they're doing all of this in tempo. And some people are scratching their heads and they're saying, okay, like, Is Tempo now just taking the Ethereum vision, let's say, and this whole cypherpunk vision and corporatizing it or just executing it in a different way? And I don't know if they feel kind of like lost by that or they feel like there's a competitive threat.
or they feel like it's just the open source thing that we once had and the decentralized thing that we once had and the crops thing that we once had. Now the corporations are here and they're taking over and they're out engineering us and maybe out executing us. And so there's some sense of like, feeling left behind there. I don't know.
It's a jumble of feelings that I think people are probably having as they're listening to this conversation. How do you square these things? How do we think about Tempo in the context of Ethereum being cypherpunk, but maybe now it's a lot smaller than we once thought it would. We thought at one time it would take the payment to use case and these would be L2s.
And now it seems like that's happening outside of the Ethereum ecosystem. Of course, You know, you're still at Reth. You're still co-developing on Ethereum. I'm sure that's going to be open source. So it's not like Ethereum doesn't benefit. And yet it's not benefiting in the same ways we originally thought it would.
And the question is, all of the good stuff that was happening with Ethereum, is it going to be happening not on Ethereum? I think a question that... people feel. It's like, why not do all of this on Ethereum? Why do this on an L1 chain in Tempo with a separate kind of thing, separate standards, separate maybe future token base? Why not do this on Ethereum instead?
Well, I think it would be hard... Well, again, look at the niches, right? Like the payments niche just requires so much capacity and so much specialization that, and I replied this to someone on Twitter also, I think earlier today, I think it was Alan, who said that, are there any approaches that you're doing to precompiles, for example, which is a technical detail in what we're doing, that
Ethereum would not do. And I'm like, yeah, of course, because Ethereum is a general purpose platform that empowers developers just self-express in the most general purpose way and doesn't really discriminate for a particular use case, which is what makes Ethereum so beautiful. At the same time, when you're doing the payments use case, it's not just the performance stuff.
There's like all sorts of like specific functionalities that you want to add into the system that just wouldn't happen otherwise. on ethereum they just would never go through the governance post it would take too long So that's one point. I think the other point is that high value DeFi will continue happening on Ethereum, right?
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