Visa, Stripe-backed Tempo roll out tools for AI payments

Visa Crypto Labs introduced Visa CLI on Wednesday, a command-line tool that lets AI agents trigger same-day card payments. The same day, Tempo, which is backed by payments company Stripe, brought its blockchain live on mainnet and released the Machine Payments Protocol to coordinate agent transactions.

Visa positions Visa CLI as an experiment from its crypto research unit. The tool is designed for developers who want agents to pay during software development without exposing sensitive credentials. A website for Visa CLI describes it as providing “the ability to securely pay for what you need as you code,” enabling “programmatic card payments without the pain of API keys.” Cuy Sheffield, who leads Visa Crypto Labs, posted on X, “Excited to share Visa CLI, the first experimental product from Visa Crypto Labs.”

Tempo launched its network and an accompanying payments standard the same day. In posts on X, the team described the blockchain as “purpose-built for payments” and focused on high-throughput stablecoin transactions, a setup used frequently in automated agent payments. The Machine Payments Protocol, co-authored with Stripe, provides “a standard way for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically,” according to Tempo.

Tempo characterizes MPP as rail-agnostic and extensible, with support at launch for multiple payment types, including stablecoins and cards. Visa has extended support for the protocol on its card network. Stripe is enabling cards, wallets, and other payment methods. Lightspark has extended support over the Lightning Network for Bitcoin payments.

The launches target growing demand for payments initiated by autonomous software. Tempo’s team wrote, “Agents can already write code, coordinate services, retrieve data, and execute complex workflows across the internet. But as these systems become more capable, they increasingly need to transact.”

Interest in agent-to-agent and agent-to-human payments has been building. In May, Coinbase introduced its x402 standard to facilitate stablecoin payments by agents. A developer toolkit for AI agents released Tuesday integrated the x402 standard.

Both announcements arrived on Wednesday. Visa Crypto Labs presented Visa CLI as an experimental product for real-time card use cases from the command line. Tempo progressed from testing to mainnet availability with a protocol intended to work across different rails and providers. Neither company disclosed transaction volumes or partner counts linked to the launches.

Visa’s approach centers on letting developers enable card payments from a local environment without relying on API keys that agents could expose. Tempo’s approach centers on a dedicated ledger and an open protocol that payment networks and service providers can adopt. The teams indicate their systems are built for high throughput to handle machine-initiated transactions.

The tools are intended to let software agents purchase APIs, reserve compute, pay for data retrieval, and settle small online tasks without manual steps, using cards, stablecoins, or other supported methods.

As we reported earlier, Andreessen Horowitz’s Noah Levine said AI agents processed about $1.6 million in payments over a recent 30-day period after removing wash trades, about 90% below a prior $24 million claim and close to Allium Labs’ adjusted estimate. Most transactions were small, metered buys for developer tools and AI services such as Firecrawl, Browserbase, and Freepik, often paid by card. Adoption of Coinbase’s x402 standard has expanded: Stripe, Cloudflare, and Vercel integrated it; Google embedded it into an agent payments protocol; and Coinbase added Facilitator support on Polygon as well as on Base and Solana.