Stripe and Paradigm Reveal Tempo Blockchain, Built With Help From OpenAI and Visa

Tempo, a layer-1 blockchain built specifically for stablecoins and payments, was announced on Thursday by a pair of prominent partners—fintech giant Stripe and crypto venture capital firm Paradigm.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchain is receiving early design input from major global firms like OpenAI, Visa, and Shopify, as it builds its network with “high-throughput, low-cost global transactions for any business use case.”

Plans for the network were first reported by Fortune in August, following a mention of the chain in a job listing.

“As stablecoins go mainstream, there’s a growing need for optimized infrastructure. Much of today’s crypto stack either explicitly or implicitly caters to trading (a highly valuable use case in its own right) but is comparatively underoptimized for payments,” wrote Matt Huang, Paradigm’s founder and the lead at Tempo. 

In addition to low fees and its payments-centric experience, the network expects to enable more than 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) with privacy features that will allow users to keep some transaction details hidden. It will also make use of an automated market maker (AMM) that allows transaction fees to be paid via any stablecoin.

“Tempo eases the path to bringing real-world flows on-chain,” Huang posted on X, highlighting Tempo’s potential for onboarding global payrolls, remittances, microtransactions, and agentic payments to blockchain. 

The network is currently in private testnet, as the team experiments with use cases like e-commerce and cross-boarder payments with its global partners, according to its website. 

Some of its design partners are also acting as validators for the network, but Tempo will eventually transition to an open, permissionless network. In other words, anyone will be able to participate in network validation in the future. 

“At Stripe, we care about high-throughput, low-latency payments use cases,” wrote Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. “As the use of stablecoins (and crypto more broadly) grows across Stripe, Bridge, and Privy, we found that existing blockchains are not optimized for them.” 

Stripe’s incubation of Tempo will rival layer-1 network plans from Google and Circle, as crypto becomes increasingly intertwined with traditional finance. 

The payments giant acquired crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy in June, less than one year after spending $1.1 billion to snatch up stablecoin payment platform, Bridge.

Tempo wasn’t the only stablecoin network announcement on Thursday, either. Crypto infrastructure firm Fireblocks also launched its Fireblocks Network, which is supported by USDC issuer Circle and more than 40 other providers.