Sep 14, 2025

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. To put Tempo in context, stablecoins (crypto tokens pegged 1:1 to fiat currencies like USD) have exploded in real-world usage. They’ve become the grease for global money movement because they’re fast, always-on, and don’t swing wildly in value. Stripe itself turned pro-stablecoin after seeing businesses actually use them: SpaceX uses stablecoins to pay vendors in hard-to-reach markets, a Latin American fintech uses them for banking services, even an Argentinian importer uses Stripe’s crypto payout features to pay suppliers. These aren’t crypto bros speculating – these are companies moving real money. As Collison noted, they’re using crypto “because it’s easier, faster, better than the status quo,” not for shenanigans. Stripe has already been dabbling in crypto rails – it acquired a startup called Bridge in 2024, which helps businesses integrate stablecoin payments across multiple blockchains. (Bridge has been Stripe’s way to let users hold USDC balances, do payouts on chains like Ethereum, Solana, etc.) But relying on external blockchains meant dealing with their limitations and fees. At peak times Stripe needs to handle 10,000+ TPS (think of all the transactions flowing through Stripe’s systems). On public chains, that either isn’t possible or gets really expensive. So, Stripe likely figured: why not build our own optimized chain and “own the whole stack”?