Payments giant Stripe and crypto investment firm Paradigm on Thursday officially unveiled Tempo, their joint blockchain project designed for stablecoin payments.
The initiative, incubated inside Stripe, is engineered to manage the kind of scale Stripe encounters in real-world financial applications, processing tens of thousands of transactions per second with sub-second finality, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison stated in an announcement.
The project launches with a roster of prominent partners including Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa, contributing to itsdesign, he added.
“We hope that Tempo makes it easier for payment acceptance, global payouts, remittances, microtransactions, tokenized deposits, agentic payments, and more to move on-chain,” he said.
Tempo, initially hinted at in August, joins a growing list of blockchain projects aiming for stablecoin payments. It represents a significant market opportunity: Stablecoins, now a $270 billion category of cryptocurrencies, are projected to become a trillion-dollar market and are seen as a faster and cheaper alternative to traditional banking systems.
Collison noted that Tempo was necessary because existing blockchains, even high-speed ones like Solana, don’t meet Stripe’s throughput or payment-focused needs.
Tempo targets 100,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality, allows fees to be paid in stablecoins rather than native tokens, and features a built-in automated market maker to ensure neutrality among issuers. The chain is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible and built on Reth, an Ethereum execution client.
Tempo operates as an independent entity, with Paradigm and Stripe as early investors. Paradigm CEO Matt Huang leads a team of 15.
“We’re building Tempo with principles of decentralization and neutrality,” Huang stated. This includes launching with a diverse set of validators and plans to transition to a permissionless model in the future.
Read more: Why Circle and Stripe (And Many Others) Are Launching Their Own Blockchains
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