Payments giant Stripe and cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm have officially launched Tempo, a joint blockchain initiative directed at enhancing stablecoin payments. This project, incubated within Stripe, aims to achieve the kind of scalability the company experiences with real-world financial applications, processing tens of thousands of transactions per second, all with sub-second finality, as confirmed by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison in a recent post on X.
Tempo kicks off its operations with a formidable lineup of partners, including notable firms like Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa. These industry heavyweights will help shape the project’s design, according to Collison.
In his remarks, Collison expressed optimism about Tempo’s potential to simplify various financial operations, stating, “We hope that Tempo makes it easier for things like payment acceptance, global payouts, remittances, microtransactions, tokenized deposits, agentic payments, and more, to move onchain.” The project was initially hinted at in August through a job posting, and its launch comes amid a growing range of blockchain efforts targeting the stablecoin payment sector.
The market for stablecoins currently sits at approximately $270 billion and is projected to expand to a trillion-dollar market, potentially disrupting traditional banking payment systems by offering a more economical and faster alternative, according to its advocates. Collison emphasized that existing blockchain networks, even high-speed ones like Solana, do not fulfill Stripe’s capacity and payment-oriented requirements.
Tempo aims to reach a throughput of 100,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality, enabling transaction fees to be settled in stablecoins rather than native tokens. It incorporates an automated market maker designed to ensure neutrality among issuers. Built on Reth, an Ethereum execution client, Tempo is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Although Tempo operates as an independent entity, it has been backed by early investments from both Paradigm and Stripe. Matt Huang, CEO of Paradigm, is heading a dedicated team of 15 people on this project. He emphasized that Tempo is being developed with decentralization and neutrality at its core, revealing intentions to launch with a diverse group of validators and plans for transitioning to a permissionless model in the future.
