NEAR Protocol's Intents infrastructure now powers settlement for the Machine Payments Protocol, a payment system built by Stripe and Tempo that lets AI agents execute transactions. The integration enables agents on MPP to settle transactions across 35 or more blockchains using NEAR's routing layer, according to an announcement posted by NEAR Protocol on August 4, 2026.
NEAR Intents is a cross-chain transaction coordination system that abstracts away the complexity of settling payments across multiple blockchains. Instead of an agent needing to know which chain holds the asset it wants to move or which chain can execute a given contract, Intents lets the agent express a settlement intent and routes it to the optimal chain automatically. The integration with MPP means any agent using Stripe and Tempo's protocol can now reach liquidity and execution across a significantly larger set of chains than previously possible.
Stripe and Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol is designed to let autonomous agents make and receive payments without human intermediation. The protocol abstracts payment rails behind a simple interface, similar to how Stripe's original API abstracted credit card processing. By connecting to NEAR Intents, agents on MPP gain access to settlement across 35 or more blockchains, rather than being confined to a single chain or a manually curated subset.
NEAR Intents launched as NEAR's answer to the fragmentation problem in crypto infrastructure: most blockchain applications operate on a single chain, and moving value across chains requires users or applications to manually bridge assets or use separate protocols. Intents pre-compiles routing logic so applications can express what they want to accomplish without specifying how. The system currently covers over 35 chains according to NEAR's official documentation, though different indexing sources report overlapping but distinct coverage counts.
No transaction volume data is available yet for the MPP-NEAR Intents route specifically. The integration is new as of August 4, 2026. NEAR Protocol has been working on Intents as infrastructure for autonomous agents, which do not have the human oversight that might guide a retail user through a manual bridge or swap. An agent operating on multiple chains simultaneously would benefit from a unified settlement layer rather than chain-specific logic.
The number of chains Intents covers has been a point of technical refinement over the past year as NEAR added support for additional networks. Different measurement methodologies yield counts ranging from 26 to 35, with NEAR's own documentation listing 35 or more. Whether the broader crypto market adopts Intents as a standard agent settlement layer will depend on uptake among other payment protocols and applications beyond Stripe and Tempo.
The integration with MPP represents one of the first major partnerships for Intents after its launch. NEAR has positioned Intents as a solution for the emerging agent economy, where autonomous systems need to move value across chains without human input. Stripe's involvement means that traditional payment infrastructure companies view agent payments as a real category worth building for, though transaction volumes on the MPP-NEAR route remain unpublished.
