Stripe and Paradigm Open Tempo Blockchain Project to Public

Stripe and cryptocurrency venture firm Paradigm have reportedly begun a public trial for their blockchain project, Tempo.

That’s according to a report Tuesday (Dec. 9) from Bloomberg News, which says the partners have opened the network to any company that wants to develop real-world stablecoin payments applications.

As Bloomberg notes, Stripe is part of a large group of companies entering the stablecoin space as interest in the tokens has surged. This surge has been fueled in part by the passage of new stablecoin legislation earlier this year, creating a framework for the fiat-pegged assets.

According to the report, Tempo’s latest partners include UBS and Cross River Bank, as well as prediction market firm Kalshi. They join the likes of Deutsche Bank, Nubank and artificial intelligence (AI) startups OpenAI and Anthropic.

“The crypto ecosystem can be quite intimidating,” Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm and project lead for Tempo, told Bloomberg. “We want to close that developer experience gap for people thinking about real-world use cases for stablecoins.”

Announced in September, Tempo is designed to be a “payments-first blockchain.” At the time, Huang argued that large swaths of existing crypto infrastructure are focused on trading and that Tempo will 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.

As PYMNTS wrote Tuesday, many people share that vision for stablecoins, which in the last 11 years have evolved from a “niche workaround for traders into the backbone of cryptocurrency markets and, increasingly, have become a candidate for global payments infrastructure.”

Today, policymakers, banks and FinTech firms are racing to define stablecoins’ role as future “digital dollars for the internet.”

But that future, the report added, cannot be grasped without looking at “the messy, improvised and at times catastrophic path that got stablecoins here.” Understanding their evolution is important because it shows the trade-offs needed to make the transformation happen: “Speed versus safety. Decentralization versus efficiency. Innovation versus regulation.”

“Stablecoins, after all, did not emerge from an elegant theory of money. They emerged from necessity in the crypto space,” the report continued. “And only time will tell if they ultimately become similarly necessary across traditional payments and financial services.”