Stripe and Silicon Valley crypto investment firm Paradigm have partnered to launch Tempo, a new Layer-1 blockchain specifically engineered for stablecoins and real-world payment applications, which entered a private testnet phase this month. A public timeline for the official launch has not yet been announced. The project is being led by Paradigm co-founder and managing partner Matt Huang.
Tempo is designed to address real-world use cases including global payments, payroll, remittances, tokenized deposits for 24/7 settlement, embedded financial accounts, microtransactions, and agentic payments. Huang stated that Tempo aims to “complement existing crypto infrastructure and be a conduit for many large enterprises to come onchain, increasing adoption of crypto tools and infrastructure.” The development of Tempo has seen technical contributions from a wide array of companies including Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa, among others.
Despite being incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, Tempo will operate as a standalone company. Its full-time team currently consists of 15 employees.
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison explained in a separate statement that Tempo will benefit from a built-in stablecoin automated market maker (AMM). This feature is intended to “enable platform neutrality with respect to different stablecoins.” Collison also outlined plans to transition from an “independent and diverse” validator set to permissionless validation.
Tempo enters a competitive market, facing other platforms that combine stablecoins with mainstream payments. These include Circle, which launched its Layer-1 blockchain Arc last month, as well as Plasma and Stable, blockchains developed by Tether specifically for USDT transactions.
Stripe, currently valued at $91.5 billion, has been actively expanding its stablecoin payment capabilities. This includes the acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider Bridge for $1.1 billion in February, followed by a deal for crypto wallet infrastructure provider Privy in June.
