State Channels and Agentic Payments — liamhorne.com/mpp · Liam Horne
Known for
Co-built the Machine Payments Protocol at Tempo after leading OP Labs.
Why chosen
He connects a decade of Ethereum payments research with agents that finally need it. He started building on Ethereum in 2016, and in 2017 he and Jeff Coleman began work on state channels, publishing their Counterfactual design in 2018. He joined Optimism in February 2021 and became CEO of OP Labs in June 2022, steering the OP Stack. At Tempo, the stablecoin payments chain, he helped build the Machine Payments Protocol with Stripe, launched in March 2026 as an open standard built on HTTP 402. Software paying software, years early and right on time.
