Stripe — yes, that Stripe, the $90B fintech known for online payments — just decided to build its own Layer-1 blockchain network called Tempo. The announcement dropped in early September 2025, when Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison took to X to say that “existing blockchains are not optimized” for the booming use of stablecoins on Stripe’s platform. In other words, the current crypto rails weren’t cutting it for Stripe’s scale, so they’re making a new one. Bold move, Stripe.

Tempo is a purpose-built blockchain for payments, incubated by Stripe and crypto VC firm Paradigm. It’s being spun out as an independent company led by Paradigm’s co-founder (and Stripe board member) Matt Huang. Notably, Stripe has enlisted a who’s-who of “design partners” to help shape Tempo: Visa, Deutsche Bank, Shopify, Revolut, Nubank, DoorDash, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more. (Yes, even AI labs like OpenAI are on board — apparently the future might include AI agents making payments, and Stripe wants Tempo ready for that “agentic payments” use case.)

Is Stripe’s Tempo going to accelerate the adoption of crypto in everyday finance, or is it a step toward corporatizing the crypto dream? Are we looking at the Visa of Web3 in the making, or just Libra 2.0 dressed in fintech clothes? I’ll be watching Tempo’s tempo (had to do it) closely. For now, consider me cautiously optimistic, with a side of sarcasm and a dash of déjà vu. After all, in fintech as in music, it’s all about keeping the right tempo — and Stripe just dropped a new beat.

So what makes Tempo special?

Think of high-throughput, low-latency crypto transactions, tuned for business payments rather than crypto trading. Tempo’s network promises to process over 100,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality — a huge leap above Ethereum’s ~20 TPS or even Solana’s few thousand TPS in practice. It’s EVM-compatible (so developers can use Ethereum-style smart contracts) but with a twist: you can pay transaction fees in any stablecoin, not a volatile gas token. Tempo achieves this via an “enshrined AMM” — essentially a built-in exchange that seamlessly converts whatever stablecoin you’re using to the fee currency on the backend. In plain English, businesses could pay fees in dollars (tokenized dollars) instead of juggling ETH or SOL, making costs predictable and dollar-denominated.

Speaking of stablecoins, Tempo is stablecoin-agnostic. It supports all major stablecoins (USD Coin, Tether, etc.) natively. Stripe’s stance is “bring your own dollar token” — a neutral platform for moving value. They even built in a native stablecoin swap feature for low-cost conversion between stablecoins. This could smooth out the on-chain FX issues (imagine swapping a USD stablecoin for a Euro stablecoin on the fly — that kind of thing).

To further court the fintech crowd, Tempo includes features like payment memos and batch transfers (for including details with payments or bundling many payments into one transaction). Those memos are even designed to align with the banking standard ISO 20022 — basically, Stripe is ensuring blockchain payments speak the language of traditional finance. There are also opt-in privacy features to keep sensitive details private while “maintaining compliance”. And indeed, compliance is a theme: Tempo supports blocklists/allowlists at the protocol level, so regulated businesses can prevent funds going to blacklisted addresses or require KYC on certain accounts. (It’s like if Ethereum had a built-in sanctions filter you could choose to use — a very corporate-friendly touch, for better or worse.)

If your head is spinning — same here. Essentially, Stripe built a blockchain that tries to feel like a high-speed payments network. It’s open and permissionless (anyone can build on it eventually), but at launch it’s in a private testnet with select partners. A “diverse group of independent entities” (including those big partners) will run validator nodes at first, before they “transition to a permissionless model” over time. In other words, it’s starting a bit like a VIP club, but they promise to open the doors wider later.