Camila Russo@CamiRusso
Two protocols are racing to become the internet's payments layer:
x402 backed by Coinbase
Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) launched today by Stripe and Tempo.
How are they different?
Short answer:
x402 is more permissionless.
MPP is more payments-optimized.
Long answer:
Assets
- MPP accepts stablecoins on Tempo, plus fiat
- x402 accepts all ERC20s, but no fiat.
Scale
- MPP's sessions primitive lets agents authenticate once, set a spending limit, and settle later, batching payments across many interactions. Better for agent scale.
- x402 is still largely per-request, although it’s moving toward prepaid flows
Settlement
- MPP requires Tempo and Stripe.
- x402 permissionless, chain agnostic
What's better?
imo, if MPP settled on any chain, it would be a clear winner. But it doesn't. And that's a huge drawback esp since it's unclear how decentralized and permissionless Tempo actually is.