DoorDash Turns to Tempo to Offer Stablecoin Payments

DoorDash will begin offering stablecoin payments for its delivery workers and merchants.

It’s part of a series of partnerships announced Tuesday (April 21) by the payments-centric blockchain Tempo, which said companies including DoorDash, Coastal Bank, Latin America-focused fintech ARQ and Tempo parent Stripe are either running or getting ready to run portions of their payment operations on stablecoin rails.

In the case of DoorDash, Tempo wrote on its blog that the partnership helps the delivery app navigate its “three-sided marketplace” involving consumers, merchants and delivery workers. Each of these parties may have different payout timing, currency and compliance requirements.

“Now multiply that across more than 40 countries. Each market has different payment rails, FX dynamics, settlement timelines, and regulatory requirements,” the blog post said. “A payout flow that works in Atlanta does not apply in Helsinki. The logistics of getting a Dasher paid in one country look nothing like the logistics in another.”

According to Tempo, the partnership focuses on three areas where it says stablecoins improve on traditional payment rails: payout speed, cross-border payment costs and allowing transactions to conclude with less friction and in fewer steps.

“If we can get merchants and Dashers their money faster, and do that in a way that’s affordable for them, that’s a no-brainer for the entire ecosystem,” said Andy Fang, DoorDash’s co-founder.

Announced last year by Stripe and cryptocurrency venture firm Paradigm, Tempo is designed to be a “payments-first blockchain.”

Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm and project lead for Tempo, argued at the time that large portions of crypto infrastructure are devoted to trading and that Tempo would instead be optimized for payments.

“We are excited to further crypto’s ability to tackle real-world use cases including global payments and payroll, remittances, tokenized deposits for 24/7 settlement, embedded financial accounts, microtransactions, agentic payments and more,” Huang said.

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows increased usage of stablecoins for payments among businesses, with 88% of firms who receive stablecoin payments converting them immediately into U.S. dollars. This spotlights the notion that these coins are seen as rails rather than stores of value, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month.

“Firms with lower operational uncertainty are more likely to increase their interest in stablecoins,” that report added.

“Companies tend to explore new payment methods when their core business feels stable. That dynamic points to a path forward. As macro conditions settle and internal systems improve, experimentation could turn into broader deployment.”