In collaboration with Paradigm, Stripe is seeking to build the next generation of stablecoin payments with several high-profile companies already onboard.
Stripe’s new blockchain payment network, Tempo, is now publicly available for testing to any interested company seeking to embed crypto and stablecoins to their core offerings.
Tempo was initially launched in September after being co-founded by Stripe and crypto investment firm Paradigm. On December 9, it went live publicly to provide financial applications to make payments visible in-chain for a wide range of businesses.
Early adopters of Tempo include fintechs such as Nubank and Revolut, major banks like Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, and merchants including DoorDash.
In addition, companies such as Kalshi, Mastercard, Visa and Klarna have joined as design partners to support the validation and development of real-time blockchain payments.
Klarna will be one of the first to launch a native USD stablecoin for testing on the Tempo mainnet next year.
“The crypto ecosystem can be quite intimidating,” said Matt Huang, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Paradigm.
“We want to close that developer experience gap for people thinking about real-world use cases for stablecoins.”
What is Tempo offering?
Built to deliver instant deterministic settlements – blocks that can be transacted to perform guaranteed finality and predictable outcomes – with low fees, Tempo seeks to address some friction challenges general-purpose blockchain’s have typically struggled with when providing financial services.
Tempo intends to provide a dedicated payment lane for companies aiming to settle with cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. These payment lanes do not interfere with other blockchain traffic, such as smart contract calls – request to interact with blockchain code – and offer payment fees as low as one-tenth of a cent per transaction.
Low fees will be a central feature of Tempo’s offering for stablecoin payments, particularly for USD-denominated stablecoins. The removal of stablecoin-native gas – which are transaction fees attached to stablecoin transactions – aims to allow payments to be made in the same currency as their underlying flows and remove the need to hold a balance of new cryptocurrencies just to perform stablecoin payments.
Tempo will also provide a decentralised, built-in exchange for stablecoins and tokenised deposits. This will help companies consolidate on-chain liquidity into a single system that simplifies routing to help users trade stablecoins more efficiently.
Each payment on the Tempo mainnet will come with a memo field for invoice numbers, cost centres, and other identifying information. This is in place to help reconcile payments without having to write and maintain code.
Tempo has revealed it can process more than 100,000 stablecoin payments per second and create a new way to build and settle payments on-chain.
What can be built on Tempo?
There are several payment functionalities Tempo is also aiming to help provide to incumbent businesses testing on its mainnet.
Tempo’s deterministic finality feature will provide businesses the ability to remove settlement uncertainty and stablecoin gas for cross-border transfers, lowering remittances while settling the transaction in seconds.
Global payouts are another key function. Payroll platforms and global commerce networks will be able to provide dedicated payments even during volatile market conditions, which can result in low-cost settlements in high-volumes.
The integration of smart accounts and protocol-level memos can also be embedded to payments flows within consumer applications, adding a new capability to the surging embedded finance market.
With agentic commerce also rapidly surging in usage, and interest from the likes of PayPal, Tempo has enabled its programmable accounts to allow AI agents to transact with predictable fees and immediate settlements.
Another trend that has recently accelerated from within the banking system has been tokenised deposits. Tempo revealed financial institutions are testing on its base layer for tokenised deposits for reconciliation and compliance registry to mirror its own traditional banking controls.
