x402 and MPP aren't competitors — they're at different layers of the agent payments stack

Stripe shipped Micropayments Protocol (MPP) last week. They're also a founding member of the x402 Foundation alongside Coinbase, Google Cloud, and Cloudflare. The "pick a side" discourse is wrong. These protocols solve different problems at different layers of the stack. What MPP solves MPP is designed for agent-to-commerce flows. The user funds a scoped token — think of it like a prepaid card with per-vendor spending caps. The agent uses that token to pay for things on the user's behalf: subscriptions, marketplace purchases, services the user explicitly authorized. The key properties: User-funded: money comes from the user's wallet/account, not the agent's Scoped authorization: each token is limited to specific vendors and amounts Recurring payments supported: the agent can charge against the token repeatedly within the authorized scope Designed for web checkout flows: replaces the "human enters card number" step in purchase flows This is powerful for consumer-facing agent use cases.