Stripe and Paradigm Launch Firm Developing ‘Payments-First Blockchain’

Financial infrastructure provider Stripe and crypto investment firm Paradigm have announced a “payments-first blockchain” called Tempo that is optimized for stablecoins and real-world payments.

Incubated by the two companies, Tempo is a new company that has its own full-time team and is led by Paradigm Co-Founder and Managing Partner Matt Huang, who will also continue in his role at Paradigm, Huang wrote in a Thursday (Sept. 4) blog post.

Huang wrote in the post that much of the existing crypto infrastructure is focused on trading and that Tempo will instead be optimized for payments. He added that the company aims to provide a way for large enterprises to go on-chain.

“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.

Stripe Co-Founder and CEO Patrick Collison wrote in a Thursday post on X that Stripe decided to help incubate Tempo because the company found that existing blockchains are not optimized for stablecoins and high-throughput, low-latency payments.

“For example, it’s valuable for real-world financial applications that fees be denominated in a fiat currency that makes sense to the user, but existing blockchains denominate their fees in blockchain-specific tokens,” Collison said.

“Batch transfers are very useful in payments, but much less important in trading,” Collison said. He added that Bitcoin does about five transactions per second, Ethereum does about 20 TPS, and Base and Solana do about 1,000 TPS, but Stripe peaks at more than 10,000 TPS.

“As such, we decided to incubate Tempo, a new blockchain, in partnership with Paradigm,” Collison said. “We think of Tempo as the payments-oriented L1, optimized for high-scale, real-world financial services applications.”

Fortune reported Aug. 11 that Stripe and Paradigm were developing a new “high-performance, payments-focused blockchain.” The report cited a job posting on a site for crypto lobbying group Blockchain Association and said Tempo was in stealth.

PYMNTS reported Aug. 29 that the promise of stablecoins is coming into focus through deliberate capital deployment, infrastructure partnerships and nascent regulation and that there were signs of investor conviction in the next wave of digital money rails.