Stripe’s Tempo blockchain ‘doomed to fail,’ says Libra co-creator

US fintech giant Stripe is pitching its new blockchain, Tempo, as a revolution in global payments.

Christian Catalini, one of the original architects of Meta’s failed stablecoin project Libra, says the project is destined to collapse under the same structural flaw.

“Stripe’s pitch is a classic: all-star team, top-tier partners, and neutrality,” Catalini said in a lengthy analysis on X. “The price for this bargain? Handing the fintech giant the keys to global payments.”

Stripe is not the only big business to venture down the path of launching a layer 1. In late August, Google announced plans to roll out GCUL, its own centralised blockchain to “create innovative payments services and financial markets products.”

These initiatives come amidst a growing stablecoin boom bolstered by US lawmakers having clubbed through the Genius Act, a stablecoin law, which has incentivised institutional players to tap into digital assets.

Libra deja vu

Catalini has lived this movie before.

In 2019, before Facebook launched its parent company Meta, Mark Zuckerberg and a consortium of tech and finance heavyweights announced Libra, a global stablecoin project. The project was later renamed as Diem.

It promised to usher in financial services to billions. But lawmakers and regulators quickly balked at the idea of handing monetary power to Silicon Valley.

“We weren’t just early; we were comically, spectacularly wrong,” Catalini said. “We had a bad case of Silicon Valley hubris — the belief that elegant code can simply wish away centuries of financial regulation.”

Even after Meta recruited veteran regulator Stuart Levey and won near-approval from Swiss watchdog FINMA, Libra was killed once global lawmakers rallied against it.

The license “was physically sitting on the desk of FINMA’s president, waiting for a signature. And then [former Federal Reserve Chair] Janet Yellen entered the chat,” Catalini said.

The mistake, he argues, wasn’t regulatory overreach but the network’s centralised design.

Enter Stripe

On September 4, Stripe announced plans to roll out Tempo together with Paradigm.

Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa were also named as initial design partners by Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO.

He argued that existing blockchains weren’t up to the task of tackling the building wave of stablecoins. The new layer 1 would be optimised for high-scale and real-world financial applications, Collison said.

“We hope that Tempo makes it easier for things like payment acceptance, global payouts, remittances, microtransactions, tokenised deposits, agentic payments, and more, to move onchain,” Collison said on X.

What’s at stake

Catalini doesn’t seem to share that optimism.

“The only thing that truly separates crypto from the systems it aims to replace is that it’s permissionless. Full stop,” he said.

That’s why he says Stripe’s Tempo is fatally compromised from the start.

“The problem with corporate chains like Tempo isn’t a matter of code — it’s a matter of incentives. Once they have a captive market, the temptation to tilt the playing field becomes irresistible,” he wrote.

If Stripe and other fintechs succeed in building walled-garden blockchains, the result won’t be financial innovation, but a reshuffling of corporate monopolies, he argued.

“We would simply swap an old monarchy of card networks and financial incumbents for a new one of fintech giants,” he said.

Meta’s bruising experience shows how entrenched financial and political systems react when tech companies attempt to centralise monetary power. Stripe, Catalini argues, is likely to trigger the same immune response.

“Open, permissionless networks are the only way forward. Anything else is doomed to fail,” he said.

Stripe didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.