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Bankless

Tempo Mainnet: The Race to Agentic Commerce

Bankless

Bankless

Tech News, Technology, News

4.71.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2026

⏱️ 80 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Tempo Mainnet is live, but this episode isn’t really about just another chain launch. It’s about a bigger claim: that AI agents are about to need native money, and that the internet may need a new payment layer to support them. Georgios Konstantopoulos and Brendan Ryan join Bankless to unpack why Tempo launched with agentic payments front and center, what MPP actually is, how it compares to x402, and why they think machine-to-machine commerce could reshape everything from paid APIs to the business model of the web itself. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🪐GALAXY | INSTITUTIONAL DIGITAL FINANCE https://bankless.cc/galaxy-podcast 🏅BITGET TRADFI | TRADE GOLD WITH USDT https://bankless.cc/bitget 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 🐇MEGAETH | 1ST REAL-TIME BLOCKCHAIN https://bankless.cc/megaeth --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Tempo Mainnet goes live 1:18 Why the launch is focused on agents 3:58 What MPP actually is 6:30 MPP vs x402 15:28 Why agentic commerce matters 20:08 The “original sin” of the internet 26:04 MCP, NLWeb, and the emerging agent stack 34:07 The onboarding flow: wallets for agents 37:11 How Tempo’s wallet security works 40:11 Tempo chain design and specs 51:13 Why build an L1 instead of an Ethereum L2? 56:10 The Ethereum tension 1:05:01 Agent identity, reputation, and ERC-8004 1:06:53 TIP20, stablecoins, and what can be built on Tempo 1:12:36 Builder opportunity in the agentic web --- RESOURCES Georgios Konstantopoulos https://x.com/gakonst Brendan Ryan https://brendanjryan.com --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript

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0:00.0

Bankless Station, I'm here with Giorgio's Constantopolis. 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. Nice. So congrats on the Tempo launch. What is, I want to know what just like the launch actually looks like,

0:21.5

you know, day one or just in the near term, the short term. What are the, some of the first

0:25.0

movers that are coming online and then also just like kind of the first categories of activities

0:30.1

that's happening on tempo. What does just like the launch kind of look like? We've been building

0:33.8

tempo since August with a lot of wonderful partners. We're working with Tribe on this.

0:39.2

The goal is to make stable coins and web scale payments to work finally,

0:44.2

using a lot of crypto blockchain technology that we've been building over the last few years.

0:49.7

Today's launch is focused on AI agents using the machine payments protocol to pay for things on the web autonomously.

0:57.5

And we're continuing to push on our work on the enterprise work streams around cross-border payments, remittances,

1:02.3

and things which really are truly what attracted us to the crypto world in the first place,

1:07.7

24-7 borderless finance and payments.

1:10.6

So there's more to come on that in next few weeks, and we'll continue sharing on that.

1:15.1

But today's launch was all about the agentic payments.

1:18.4

All about agentic payments.

1:19.6

Well, I mean, there's main net, right?

1:21.4

But I do notice that there is just like a very large emphasis on this MPP thing, which I'll think we'll go into.

1:29.1

I mean, Tempo is known in the crypto industry is like you guys do stable coins.

1:33.9

You guys talk about remittances, tokenized deposits.

1:37.1

If, you know, somebody wants a stable coin, they might go to Stripe and Tempo and get a

1:41.3

stable coin minted on tempo.

1:42.9

But it really seems that like that wasn't

1:44.6

really the focus of today's main net launch. Really the focus, the emphasis is on this machine

...

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