Stripe, Paradigm Unveil Tempo as Blockchain Race for High-Speed Stablecoin Payments Heats Up

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 designed to handle the kind of scale Stripe sees in real-world financial applications, processing tens of thousands of transactions per second with sub-second finality, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said in an X post.

The project launches with a list of heavyweight partners including Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered and Visa, who will help shape its design, he added.

“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,” he said.

Tempo, first leaked in August in a job posting, is joining a growing roster of blockchain projects competing for stablecoin payments. It’s potentially a huge market opportunity: Stablecoins, now a $270 billion class of cryptocurrencies, are projected to become a trillion-dollar market and poised to disrupt global payment flows as a cheaper, faster alternative to banking rails, proponents say.

Collison said Tempo was needed because current blockchains, even high-speed ones like Solana (SOL), don’t match Stripe’s throughput or payment-focused requirements.

Tempo targets 100,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality, allows fees to be paid in stablecoins instead of native tokens and includes a built-in automated market maker to ensure neutrality across issuers, he said. The chain is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible and built on Reth, an Ethereum (ETH) execution client.

Tempo is an independent entity with Paradigm and Stripe being early investors, Collison said. Paradigm CEO Matt Huang is leading a team of 15 person.

“We’re building Tempo with principles of decentralization and neutrality,” Huang said in an X post. That includes launching with a diverse set of validators with plans to transition to a permissionless model in the future.

Read more: Why Circle and Stripe (And Many Others) Are Launching Their Own Blockchains