Can Stripe’s MPP and Colosseum’s Frontier Hackathon Revive Solana’s Agentic Economy?

Onchain payments solutions on Solana continue to evolve, this time from outside the chain’s native ecosystem. 

Co-authored by Stripe and Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain incubated by the e-commerce giant, MPP (Machine Payments Protocol) is now live on Solana, unlocking a wealth of new tools for builders.

But despite an expanding technical support, the Agentic Economy appears to be losing momentum. Can a timely Colosseum hackathon inspire meaningful new products in the sector?

Stripe’s MPP Live on Solana

On March 18, the Tempo mainnet went live, complete with an open standard for Machine Payments co-authored by Stripe. Designed with internet-native AI commerce in mind, MMP enables agents and services to coordinate an extensive range of payment types programmatically.

Just one week after its launch, Solana has enabled support for the open standard, bringing a wealth of new use cases to the onchain agentic economy. MPP on Solana is compatible with all the network’s stablecoins, both SPLs and Token2022. 

According to the documentation, Solana’s MPP specifications support split payouts and native fee payer support. In practice, this feature will enable server operators to pay network fees on behalf of users, addressing a key UX concern in consumer applications.

Is the Agentic Economy Having Its Dunning-Kruger Moment?

Despite all the hype and excitement around the potential of the Agentic Economy, onchain data suggests that machine-based activity has greatly declined in recent weeks. 

According to Dune Analytics data, x402 transactions on Solana are nearly non-existent. After processing over $100,000 in daily volume throughout December, the absence of activity in March suggests that builders have moved on from the sector.

One could argue that the Agentic Economy is enduring the necessary growing pains of a Dunning-Kruger adoption curve. AI hyperspeculation drove immense interest in the earliest iteration of internet commerce, but a lack of accessible tooling and education meant that builders were unable to develop meaningful, sticky products.

Solana’s embrace of Tempo’s MPP could indicate a step in the right direction, providing emerging applications with the tools they need to create sustainable business models.

Colosseum Announces Frontier Hackathon

Hackathons, like those organized and operated by Colosseum, offer a timely opportunity for would-be entrepreneurs to flex their creativity and experiment with new toolkits. 

Announced on March 24, Colosseum’s next online Hackathon, Frontier, is set to begin on April 6th, and will likely give birth to new products competing in Solana’s AI sector. Since opening registration yesterday, over 880 teams have registered for the event.

There’s no denying that Solana needs it. Despite all the network’s success in spot trading and high-performance DeFi, Solana’s agentic commerce sector is falling behind its rivals.

Artemis data suggests that Base, creators of x402 standard, has consistently dominated the Agentic economy, commanding the bulk of x402 transactions across all blockchains. While this likely skewed due to Base’s first-mover advantage, historic data shows that the x402 standard has failed to find traction on Solana.

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