What Is Tempo? The Payments and Stablecoin Blockchain Built by Stripe
Stablecoins have surged in popularity, now surpassing a $300 billion market cap, with U.S. officials seeing potential for much larger growth. Stripe and Paradigm have launched Tempo, a new layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoins and payment applications. Unlike versatile chains such as Ethereum or Solana, Tempo is tailored to real-world payment flows—global payouts, payroll, embedded accounts, remittances, tokenized deposits, microtransactions, and agentic payments. It promises low fees, throughput of over 100,000 transactions per second, batch transfers, memo fields, and lets users pay gas fees with any network stablecoin. Early partners and validators include major companies such as OpenAI, Shopify, and Visa, and wallet providers like Phantom and MetaMask. Currently in private testnet, Tempo will initially use a set of independent validators before eventually becoming open and permissionless. The blockchain includes an opt-in privacy feature, and has attracted top talent and raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation, signaling strong institutional backing for this stablecoin-centric payments ecosystem.
