Payments giant Stripe has teamed up with a Silicon Valley crypto firm to launch a blockchain firm geared to improving stablecoin payments- and has already signed up European firms Revolut and Deutsche Bank as partners.
Stripe, founded by two Irish entrepreneur brothers and which is dual-headquartered in Dublin and San Francisco, is launching Tempo with crypto outfit Paradigm.
The launch of Tempo comes amid a crypto bounce, helped by a pro-crypto Trump government and mainstream banks trying out blockchain technology as well as big brands embracing stablecoin payments, which are types of crypto backed by assets seen as reliable, like the dollar.
Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison explained the rationale behind Tempo in a post on X, saying that existing blockchains were not “optimized” for Stripe, Stripe-owned crypto wallet Privy and Stripe-owned stablecoin platform Bridge.
Tempo is what is called a layer 1 blockchain, which is the main network of a blockchain, where core functions like transactions occur. Other layer 1 blockchains include Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Collison said: "We think of Tempo as the payments-oriented L1, optimized for high-scale, real-world financial services applications.”
Collison said Tempo was geared towards improving payment acceptance, global payouts, remittances, microtransactions, tokenised deposits, and agentic payments.
Tempo is independent of Stripe, but has Stripe and Paradigm as its first investors. The venture will likely benefit from the customer base of Stripe, which includes half of the Fortune 500 and which processed over $1tn in payments in 2024.
Tempo’s partners include Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa, said Collison. The Tempo team is 15-strong.
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