The problem
Autonomous vehicles, AI agents, and machines increasingly pay for real-world services: parking, charging, tolls. Existing payment systems assume a human present, per-transaction approval, or always-on connectivity—none of which work for machines operating at scale.
How MPCP works
A payment is accepted only if the recipient can verify a chain of signed artifacts. Each step narrows what the machine is allowed to do. As shown above, MPCP flows from policy through budget and payment authorization to settlement.
MPCP is to machine payments what OAuth is to API authorization.
View the Fleet-EV reference flow → View the Human-Agent reference flow →Key characteristics
- Bounded authorization — Pre-authorized budgets, not per-transaction approval
- Deterministic verification — Every settlement verifiable against the authorization chain
- Settlement-agnostic — Works with XRPL, EVM, Stripe, hosted providers
- Offline-capable — Payments can complete when the network is unavailable
- Policy-first — All spending derives from explicit policy rules