There are lots of crypto skeptics on HN (and we ourselves were disappointed with crypto's payments utility for much of the past decade), so it might be interesting to share what changed our mind over the past couple of years: we started to notice a lot of real-world businesses finding utility in stablecoins. For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America. We're currently adding stablecoin functionality to the Stripe dashboard, and the first user is an Argentinian bike importer that finds transacting with their suppliers to be challenging.
Importantly, none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit. They're performing real-world financial activity, and they've found that crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante.
Here's the play. It's very simple, and it's quite good.
Stripe processes a LOT of money. The customers that get that money need to move it around. Often to banks. Stripe makes no money on that.
Over the last few years, stablecoins have become a preferred means to hold and move money (for convenience, etc).
Stablecoin providers make money on their float -- selling stablecoins means you get free deposits, and risk-free rates are presently around 4%. For every $1M in stablecoins your customers hold, you can make $40k/year. Stablecoin providers like Circle pay about half of that back out to partners that sell the tokens.
Stripe is huge, and well-trusted by customers for handling payments. By adoption stablecoin infrastructure to control financial flows into stablecoins, they can amass huge amounts of stablecoin sales.
If even ~3% of their transaction volume gets held in Stablecoins, and they make 1% a year on that, it's about $1B a year in bottom line.
Let me help explain whether blockchains are useful or not: They're not.
The US gov let Circle be a less-regulated bank than other banks. This is called "regulatory arbitrage". You can take advantage of it by checking the box that you have a "blockchain".
Stripe noticed "wow, things labeled blockchain are nice for some people to use" because of this dumb inconsistent banking regulation situation.
Stripe doesn't mention that the underlying tech is impotent, they just have to play along, and here we are.
Okay, so one: Obviously pointless from a tech POV. There is nothing that a Stripe controlled blockchain could offer that a database could not.
But then, why? Sadly, as someone who does like the ideals of true cryptocurrency, yet another way to make sure "real" crypto doesn't happen, much like what is happening to BTC.
Here's hoping (yeah, it's a long shot) people see through all of this and maybe, MAYBE, get into the actual ideals of cryptocurrency again.
This uses blockchain only for marketing buzzwords.
Stablecoins require trusting that the coin issuer doesn't print money. This goes against the core premise of blockchain being trustless!
This is just a payment API with extra steps (all of the integrity and identity features use cryptography that works without blockchain, unless your definition of blockchain is broad enough to include git and matrix chats, then the stripe thing is a blockchain too).
So like 11 years ago, Stripe made investments into Stellar, which was supposed to be a payment network that would facilitate transactions into existing currencies. I think that hasn't really gone where it was hoped?
This is a pretty big deal. Stripe is already processing billions of transactions. Additionally Stripe already has the relationship with merchants that other L1's lack along with the payment network expertise.
If Stripe’s closed-loop system scales, banks and card networks could lose significant transaction volume, fees and even merchant relationships. Merchants and customers win with lower transaction fees. This marks a very credible and large-scale effort yet to challenge the Visa and Mastercard duopoly.
Obviously not perfect and other questionable projects have stained blockchains reputation but it is a net win, no?
Unironically excited to learn: Why is this a blockchain? Why could stripe not just do this (maybe better) without the blockchain bit?
I am actually optimistic that, finally, there could be a convincing answer, because stripe does not strike me as the type of company that would do this without a very good reason. (I am slightly less optimistic, because the page itself does not offer an answer to this question, and instead argues for tempo against other blockchains. But only slightly.)
I'm trying to figure out how this is decentralized? "A diverse group of entities" will run validator nodes. This sounds like it's just a Solana clone then.
It doesn't look like there's any information about the consensus mechanism, until that's described in detail, it's unclear what the advantages are, or if it really is suited to payments. There are existing algorithms (like Avalanche L1, or some of the Ethereum L2s), which have fast finality particularly suited to the point-of-sale use case.
They cut out a lot of work for themselves expecting stable coins to materialize on their own chain. It's Stripe, so maybe they are allowed to mint their own USD stable coin, but that's one coin. They might have been better off making an L2 on Ethereum. Otherwise they are going to have to run Uniswap in their EVM implementation and hope that liquidity shows up.
I can see Stripe's customers wanting to use a solution that just works and is backed by Stripe's own distributed ledger, but I can't see their customers' customers wanting to do the same. Their customers' customers are going to want liquidity to other tokens, and privacy. At this point I don't think that a payments protocol can succeed unless it provides privacy comparable to Monero, liquidity to a major L1 and its family of tokens, and of course, fast finality.
Co-founder of Lopay here, we're a small but heavy Stripe user with £1B+ processed across Connect, Terminal, Identity, Instant payouts, Issuing... you name it.
We're looking at stable coins for the following use cases:
1. Instant clearing and settlement of 'floats' & liquidity - EG moving liquidity between our network to support instant/same day payouts or instant funding of a spend card.
2. Instant cross border payments (lots of people doing this already in companies that operate multinationally). EG, our USD top-ups today take 3 days in fiat, which can cause operational issues.
3. Offering our merchants (who are typically small businesses) optionality to hold USD in countries that have volatile currencies.
I'll also note that many people forget that the cost of a payment network isn't merely the movement of money, it's also KYC, dispute resolution, fraud prevention etc...
I wonder if the tempo team has looked at AI automating dispute resolution and fraud detection/prevention 'on chain'.. The network could fund the compute required for the AI to complete these tasks.
> Tempo was started by Stripe and Paradigm, with design input from Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, Visa, and more.
Does this mean these companies are about to start accepting stablecoins as payment (via Tempo?) some time in the future? Seems out of the ordinary to work with these companies otherwise.
So if one ignores the liability/regulation part of this stunt, and just look at the technical merit. Could you then say that this blockchain really provides nothing that a traditional centralized system wouldn't? But at much higher complexity and cost?
Wouldn't that just mean that the whole schtick is to avoid regulation? If I as a regulator saw this, I'd just schedule it for my next meeting, since you want to avoid having companies doing regulatory exploits "until regulation catches up". It's Uber all over otherwise.
Crypto has delivered a lot of great projects in the past 10+ years:
* A new store of value (Bitcoin)
* Programmable money with a lot of innovation still happening (Ethereum ecosystem)
* Fully compliant chains for decentralized finance and payments
* Fully compliant solutions for enterprises (Ripple and tons of others)
* Projects that support financial inclusion worldwide (Stellar is awesome)
* Stablecoins - basically stable, open, regulated money with lower fees
* Privacy is the next focus with zero-knowledge (a very impressive tech) is being integrated
* ... and a lot more ...
Sure, some people thought buying tokens was a way to become rich quick and lost money. Yes, some projects were not regulated and the regulators need to catch up. But overall progress is impressive imo.
The sales pitch: It's permissionless, but also has baked in compliance. These two things are not compatible. Stripe must comply with US regulation, they aren't going to launch a financial network that is actually permissionless.
I worked in crypto space for about 2 years ; and even tough we had great use of the crypto-system for our community ; it ended up being a large cost that we could have yielded better with something else - and it was not because specifically "crypto" - but because ultimately the engineering costs of a generic purpose chain are replicated to all child-chains. So you end up with drastic cost for something that would have seemed pretty simple to resolve. Not only that - the hole thing stinks with a lack of engineering methodology - there are so many ways to build a decentralized system and many of these are shadowed by the constraints and what-not blockchain overhead is adding. I'm not saying is *bad for everything* - i'm saying it's difficult to use properly ; and using a "chain as a service" ultimately provokes a lot of cost. For the one that stripe is providing ; I suspect it's a POA with standard implementation which is specifically tailored for building coins - and this is another subject which is very grey as indeed this provides a way to incentivize, construct "exchange contracts" for certain actions etc... - this is an interesting space - but as others are saying it's also very unregulated.
Didn't a number of companies led by Facebook already attempt to do this with Libra (Diem) and basically got nuked from orbit by US regulators? I have to assume this is primarily happening now because there is a more favorable (nonexistent) regulatory environment.
it will never be full available to us unlike bitcoin or ethereum? this is literally like a fast db? like you people here used to say. Finally HN is right and stripe founders joined on calling fast db a "blockchain" with lie.
they will censor you and block you in blockchain level so literally db for few big companies, lol.
Anyone know what this actually means? Both literally (what is Reth?) and what it means qualitatively: are Stripe’s crypto efforts competing with Ethereum or strengthening it?
"Comprehensive technical documentation for developers coming soon."
Is this an actual public "blockchain"? Can anyone read it and archive all the transactions? Are there multiple validators who have to agree? Or is this really just a proprietary database?
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Is it a blockchain though? Or anything that remotely resembles block creation in some concentrated datacenters with Tempo's "design partners" gets to be called that.
Something claiming over 20-30 tps onchain is usually a big blocker. Big blocker design is well recognized as insecure: no end user is able to run a full node locally, only datacenters are able to keep up with 100k tps load. Which diminishes entire purpose of creating a blockchain. Could have been a database with 100k tps or 3-of-4 validator multisig like Hyperledger, wouldn't matter.
> Tempo is a neutral, permissionless blockchain open for anyone to build on.
> A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model.
> Protect your users by keeping important transaction details private while maintaining compliance standards.
Sounds like it actually has potential. This could enable global QR-code payments using and open, decentralized, and private system. Something like fiat cash payments, but digital. I hope that Valve is keeping track of it, for starters.
The scene has really moved on. I had a modest amount of bitcoin that's just been sitting there since the Silkroad. I'm broke and finally decided to use it.
Asked a crypto friend how to manage it in 2025, he pointed me to a service that I could use with Google Pay. Mental. I was just walking into normie places and paying with my ill-gotten gains.
There's a little panel on the bottom right where you can change some parameters of the animation - setting twist high makes some interesting patterns.
I wonder if that's intentional or left in from debugging the animation when it was being created. As-is felt like a nice easter egg and I appreciated it being included.
> Global payouts
> Pay anyone, anywhere, in any currency—without banking delays or fees.
Being a Stripe customer from Country XY, charging my customers in USD and getting charged a hefty fee by Stripe for the conversion when I have a payout, I wonder how this would affect their business model.
“What fascinates me about this Stripe + stablecoin integration is less about the underlying blockchain, and more about the actual behavior change it can trigger in businesses.
For example, in markets like Latin America, stablecoins aren’t just ‘faster payments’—they’re an escape hatch from broken financial infrastructure. That makes them feel less like a new technology experiment and more like electricity or the internet: invisible, but transformative.
The interesting question to me is: what happens once small/medium businesses start building on top of this instead of just using it for payments? Could we see the same pattern as the early web—where it started as “publishing pages” but turned into entire industries?”
I wonder if this was initiated by all of the steam and itch.io content getting removed due to payment processor rules. If I remember correctly steam used stripe (at least at one point in time) so it might be trying to get back into that market without being limited by the payment processors above them.
This would be more exciting if the current steam/itch situation didn't rest (at least partially) on their shoulders as payment processors. Other people in the threads have brought up the lack of regulation and market capture that Stripe enjoys so I won't rehash those points here.
I can't see this as a positive because of how Stripe has behaved in terms of preventing transactions in the past. Although Tempo is behaving more like a b2b model or fintech-specific orgs in this case, the shoe-drop is when they decide a particular bank, or fintech org, or product is not allowed to perform the transaction on their network after the market capture takes place.
> The blockchain will be secured by an independent and diverse validator set, with a roadmap toward permissionless validators
This sounds like a „private blockchain“, which loses a lot of the advantages to me, but, if designed correctly, it may still produce a very solid and long living platform if there are many parties interested in keeping it running.
Do consider me skeptical that Stripe will actually cede enough control for this advantage to materialize since that’s just not what companies are incentivized to do.
Doesn't pass the Grandma Test. I could not simplify this enough to explain what this is to anyone non-technical and neither can you:
Tempo is a purpose-built, layer 1 blockchain for payments, developed in partnership with leading fintechs and Fortune 500s. With support for all major stablecoins, Tempo enables high-throughput, low-cost global transactions for any business use case.
Blockchain people have always hated chargebacks, but any successful payment rail needs a system for dispute resolution.
I run e-commerce business and I’ve received bullshit chargebacks before. But I’m also a consumer and I’ve filed legitimate chargebacks before.
Related: I’ve also had my bank send money to the wrong place before.
There must be some means of reversing transactions in some cases. Some arbitration mechanism. Some dispute resolution procedure. Some means of doing escrow.
There have been a few attempts to start private L1, but based on what EY's Paul Brody says they fail due to the complexity of validator politics and inability to achieve a reasonable level of trustlessness. The more respectable public chains do not have this problem. It is also the reason why we have seen more companies launch their own L2's - L1's are just a messy business.
I have nothing intelligent to say about the blockchain aspect, but this is one of the most illegible websites I've encountered recently. What is the purpose of the crazy spaghetti text background and random low-contrast color palette? Why am I given a cosmetic customization panel for what's supposed to be a serious financial product?
My first impression is that it perfectly combines all the drawbacks of blockchain technologies with the rigidity and restrictions of a centralized TradFi system.
Yeah I can't wait to run my operations on a KYC-guarded, AML-choked blockchain in the US jurisdiction.
(and I'm saying that as a huge crypto/blockchain optimist)
It’s important to distinguish that these kinds of announcements are only confirmations of the underlying value/potential of limited parts of crypto tech. But NOT a celebration of crypto coins, even though resulting market and Twitter activity would have us believe otherwise. It’s not like stripe is buying specific coins…
The animations on the landing page are so over-engineered, I love it. The light movement along with the mouse on hover, the movement of the right animation based on the scroll and mouse movement while mousedown activated, the zoom-in as you keep scrolling down. Love this attention to detail on a landing page.
Who is backing this stablecoin? Who is managing the backing? Where is Tempo located?
Tether has now moved to Bukele's paradise El Salvador and its backing is managed by Howard Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald. Previously Tether's funds were managed by Deltec in the Caribbean, a bank with a colorful history.
Why banks don't make their own blockchain or public distributed database of transactions or whatever else you want to call it. There are thousands of banks in the world and each of that bank can be a validator node. Seems like pretty robust network to me.
“What fascinates me about this Stripe + stablecoin integration is less about the underlying blockchain, and more about the actual behavior change it can trigger in businesses.
For example, in markets like Latin America, stablecoins aren’t just ‘faster payments’—they’re an escape hatch from broken financial infrastructure. That makes them feel less like a new technology experiment and more like electricity or the internet: invisible, but transformative.
The interesting question to me is: what happens once small/medium businesses start building on top of this instead of just using it for payments? Could we see the same pattern as the early web—where it started as “publishing pages” but turned into entire industries?
Blockchain is such a useful and needed technology for mass adoption, yet so redundant to have in the US because of how much side-eye treatment it gets. Blockchain makes more sense to have here than anywhere else in the world. blockchain does not need to handle high transaction rate the same as visa or MasterCard protocols. There needs to be micro workers that can handle transactions in real-time in Blockchain methodology should be reserved for when recording these transactions. The whole point to have Blockchain is to maintain integrity and security, there is no need for this technology to do small tasks when something else can do that more efficient and successfully, When making this technology efficient, you tend to lose the essence of what that technology is representing in the first place IMO.
I was initially going to reply to someone, but maybe this is useful as its own parent.
In my finance experience, the answer to the "why blockchain" question is settlement. Every banking system (local, international) has a settlement process.
Settlement is where bank counterparties have to tally up who owes whom, and pay each other. That process still takes time internationally, and is complex because of the parties involved.
A more concrete example (I've audited interbank settlements for a local bank in my country):
When I buy something from Amazon as a crossborder transaction with my Visa, my bank and the merchant/bank that Amazon use enter into a counterparty obligation, where in a direct way they'd have to pay each other, incl moving funds between countries.
If these 2 banks are the only banks in the world, they can both tally up the transfer of funds to each other, and then pay each other the difference. That'd still take time, right?
Now, we have hundreds of counterparties, using different systems, Visa, MasterCard, Amex, local clearing houses for EFTs, etc. There's also merchants like Stripe who'll be doing the processing, central banks who also ultimately settle currencies among each other.
They all have to wait for proof of funds clearing at some level.
If I'm doing an international transfer to my friend, their bank won't want to just credit their account instantly because the time it'll take for them to receive settlement of those funds isn't instant. Else they're going to pay the cost of a deposit that isn't there (let's assume my friend earns interest on positive balances).
The process is that the banks have to recon each clearing house's balance, aggregate that to a list of values like:
* Amex: owes us R200m
* Visa: pay them R300m
* Clearing house: etc.
Typically the bank's treasury department then effects those transfers. Don't know about other banks, but the bank I audited, it was done by a person daily, their responsibilities are to ensure those settlement aggregates are received/paid, and to resolve differences.
Beneath this person, at that bank, was a team of people who did recons all day. This was in 2012, so hopefully things changed, but I know that team still exists.
Once settlement's taken place, there's another team that verifies international settlements and then approves transfers to my local account. As a data point, it used to take me ~7 days to receive my salary from a US employer while in South Africa.
With crypto, my experience has been that settlement gets delayed, virtualised and distributed because you have a single layer (or still fewer layers across chains).
You send me USDC from wherever, we already don't involve:
* Payment processors like Visa
* Central banks as no balance of payments processes are affected
* Banks who need to reconcile cross-payments and settle them
Instead, if we're using an exchange (if you're using a local exchange), the funds arrive in the exchange's wallet shortly. The exchange has a constant flow of users buying and selling their local currency. They're in charge of settlement between their wallets and bank accounts.
I'll sell my USDC into my local currency ZAR, and if I withdraw it, the exchange keeps ZAR in local banks, and they send me that money immediately. My crypto salary would be in my bank as ZAR in 30-60 minutes.
Now, I said that crypto delays settlement. My exchange will eventually run out of fiat currency, or need to rebalance. They'll trade some other counterparty exchange, and settle that transaction through SWIFT/equivalent. That settlement will take the 5-7 day process. They just delayed it for their client.
I said it's virtualised because they've skipped the whole process of moving net flows and relied on a central entity, the blockchain, to do that. Ultimately it's a faster process than that backoffice of the bank.
And distributed. Every exchange or remitter has now become their own micro clearing house, and they participate in the banking system by earning their own fees, running their own process.
They only need to interact with each other at higher levels if they need to convert their USDC to US dollars. Interestingly that process happens at one place, but as long as cash and tokens move bidirectionally, the process can get relayed to the point where only a few US banks need to deal with the issuer of USDC.
So the way I’m understanding the conversation is that
1. We all desperately need a sane digital instant means of transferring money between “institutions” that just works
2. No-one believes that a third party solution would not end up with that third party holding everyone over a barrel (Visa but on steroids). So any simple “use Postgres” is out
3. So it’s either a trustless, open blockchain (bitcoins blockchain or possibly this Tempo). But there are huge drawbacks to The Blockchain - apart from the ratty reputation it has so far, there are problems with making a reversal of payment of both parties don’t agree, and other issues as nauseum.
I don’t get how well tempo solves any of this.
4. We end up with what I think is likely to be the solution(s). Islands of “trust groups” that replace SWIFT and its like with blockchain in a piecemeal fashion, but the cost benefit ratio is totally subsumed by the massively high costs of replacing the towers of process, regulation and software balanced on top of SWIFT etc
4.a. Or the central banks introduce their own “stablecoins ” - and people punt all the complicated bits of law and regulation and reversals over to the existing legal regulatory frameworks.
In short the ultimate problem is that sending a signal moving 1 million dollars from Kenya to Kansas is simple (wooden sticks did this a millennia ago).
The problem is a legal, cultural, social framework that all parties can trust and believe will fix their grievances. That’s basically … the global
Legal framework we have now, with the solutions we have now including following court orders.
If the electronic system cannot follow the current frameworks requirements (ie the old lady did not mean to send her life savings to that wallet, get it back) then the electronic system still needs overlays that can - and there is not just a lot of complexity - there is an incredible amount of complexity
I get the feeling I’m yet again talking myself out of thinking we can have a sane digital currency for similar reasons to why we can’t vote electronically.
Why does Stripe want to creatively ruin their reputation by venturing into crypto / blockchain?
I don't see anyone in the real world using blockchains at all.
I get AI as it was a real world paradigm shift, but I have never seen anything in this blockchain / crypto space that has reached 100-500 million users let alone 1 billion users, that isn't based on speculation.
> A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model.
Ah yes, the good old "permissionless" blockchain, that's 100% centralized for just the first 100 years of operation, give or take [subject to updated timelines after 100 years]
Bitcoin is decentralized because the sun distributes energy somewhat evenly across the globe.
The other 206701340 crypto projects, including this one, are decentralized because ... ?
From the very sparse info on the page, it seems this project does what so many other chains do to make payments faster and cheaper: They log them on a database that is synchronized across only a few computers.
In other words: I can't find any info on that page explaining how they plan to achieve decentralization.
> A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model.
So not decentralized at all. The only reason to not open source validators and allow the public to run their own is to make insiders rich. Another crypto grift that will mint a few millionaires before either being forgotten or merely being used as a speculative instrument.
I think it's more like "SWIFT but using blockchain" instead of Bitcoin competitor. Regardless of that, I wonder how's Bitcoin/ETH's market value with the introduction of Tempo? Since it's like the better version (if you don't mind oligarchy)
The whole payment sector is so fucking idiotic. Why would Stripe need a L1? Partnered with paradigm? The company behind every crypto scam in the past 5 years? Who needs this? Who wants this? I just want to order a book from Amazon; why would there be a blockchain?
Imagine my delight as a crypto cynic who only admires gold/stablecoin and had recently created a article just for hn (and thus the name) about this... and how stablecoins make sense
But I had literally said that stripe should've actually ventured into and created their own cryptocurrency or something...
Tada, I might be one of the happiest person thinking that I actually really predicted something by my own observations.
By what I meant most crypto, I meant anything aside from stablecoin (like gold backed/usd backed)
Now that being said, I am still a little critic as to I don't see any offical stripe message and I don't see a way on how it would be implemented?
Like one of the things that I wished in my article was this idea that someone on twitter originally asked where currently if you had money in stripe and wanted to pay it anywhere else, you had to have it enter your bank which might take 14 days and then lets say you want to give it to someone else who has stripe(think anthropic), then they would get it back again after 14 days
So someone basically asked to create something similar to a stripe card.
I think that this blockchain is it, except I feel like that you could send money to anyone in a non kyc manner too via this which is again a plus point for sometimes where I feel like that in this world every transaction is usually tracked and as such something like this change is really welcomed.
Once again, can someone really explain what is going to happen in tempo's future as maybe its me who couldn't focus in such a website. I actually went and read the article that the other company that partnered with stripe (paradigm), so I just read paradigm's article: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2025/09/tempo-payments-first-blockc...
and they say that it is a new incubator/partnership b/w stripe and them, but would that mean that this tempo is going to be integrated in the stripe ecosystem or no?
I always thought that stripe and stellar had some deep connections but honestly I couldn't care less about it. I don't care about these fake tokens but rather stablecoins/gold stablecoins
The folks on Hacker News seem pretty anti-crypto, but I feel like they're missing the point. If we're actually looking for ways to fix the US debt, stablecoins are definitely worth considering
I'm surprised by their extraordinary claim of 100,000 TPS. That would require extraordinary evidence, especially with contention and hot accounts in mind.
I guess domains might not mean as much as they used to, but xyz? To me that's something you get for experiments and one-offs, not something you use for a serious enterprise you want to get people onboard for.
I honestly thought this was fake and not from stripe the first time I saw it. (I kinda still do with that domain.)
This is off-topic to their grand blockchain adventures, but I need to mention it:
I would love for stripe to start paying appropriate VAT on transactions between their merchants and EU citizens, I've been on their ass about it for nearly a year now. I've reported multiple merchants to them which simply refused to provide an VAT invoice for any transactions. Legally, merchants outside EU are required to pay VAT on their B2C transactions if their EU transaction volume goes above a certain limit, and provide VAT invoice for B2B transactions (but with 0% VAT because it is B2B).
But unfortunately Stripe doesn't seem to have the technology to do a SUM(*) in their database, or check if an email address ends in '.de' or '.it' when they take the payment. So they simply do not give a damn if their merchants provide an invoice with the transaction or not.
Oftentimes it was the problem to actually get an invoice document which has company name, company registration number, street address, city, and tax ID. Extremely basic information which is required on all EU invoices. Many times I have submitted invoices from Stripe merchants to my tax accountant and my tax accountant told me that those are not proper invoices and to please reach out to the merchant to get EU-legal invoices.
Stripe has the technological capabilities to implement proper compliance checks, but they choose to let their merchants send you rubbish self-made PDF invoices with a big red "paid" stamp without any information or "official" Stripe invoices with total fantasy names and fantasy company information. You never know if your merchant is sitting in an embargoed country or is just some schmuck from San Francisco trying to hide their ties to a website.
If other HN users from the EU have been fighting Stripe to get EU-compliant VAT invoices for their B2B or B2C purchases, please feel free to reach out. I've been doing a big stink about this and to me it feels like a deliberate pattern of enabling their merchants to ignore EU VAT obligations.
It's really sad that my extremely positive impression of Stripe has been deeply tainted by this kind of experience across various purchases and subscriptions with Stripe merchants. I had to spend so much time pleading with them to provide proper invoices.
The sad irony is that blockchain will do more to promote dictatorship as a superior form of government around the world than any other technology.
Blockchain's primary usefulness has been to evade regulations, and due to the rapidly changing nature of the technology, representative democracies with legitimate legal institutions have lagged behind when it comes to regulating it.
The country that wins (prevents fraudsters and scammers who exploit crypto) will be a dictatorship solely because a dictatorship is the only form of government fast enough to either rein in lawless cryptofinance, or exploit it maximally.
When enough actual value creating people who bought in to the libertarian crypto fantasy finally realize that they're slaving away to make ends meet in an economy that enshrines meme coin shills and folks who use crypto to evade the law, it will have been too late.
It is fascinating to see how Stripe was so close to integrate Bitcoin, but then did a 180 and decided to stand on the wrong side of history every since. No idea what the hell is wrong with their CEO.
Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
(tempo.xyz)805 points by _nvs 4 September 2025 | 1067 comments
Comments
Importantly, none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit. They're performing real-world financial activity, and they've found that crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante.
Stripe processes a LOT of money. The customers that get that money need to move it around. Often to banks. Stripe makes no money on that.
Over the last few years, stablecoins have become a preferred means to hold and move money (for convenience, etc).
Stablecoin providers make money on their float -- selling stablecoins means you get free deposits, and risk-free rates are presently around 4%. For every $1M in stablecoins your customers hold, you can make $40k/year. Stablecoin providers like Circle pay about half of that back out to partners that sell the tokens.
Stripe is huge, and well-trusted by customers for handling payments. By adoption stablecoin infrastructure to control financial flows into stablecoins, they can amass huge amounts of stablecoin sales.
If even ~3% of their transaction volume gets held in Stablecoins, and they make 1% a year on that, it's about $1B a year in bottom line.
~$10e9 (daily avg vol) * 365 * 3% (converted to stablecoins) * 1% (net income) = ~$1B
The US gov let Circle be a less-regulated bank than other banks. This is called "regulatory arbitrage". You can take advantage of it by checking the box that you have a "blockchain".
Stripe noticed "wow, things labeled blockchain are nice for some people to use" because of this dumb inconsistent banking regulation situation.
Stripe doesn't mention that the underlying tech is impotent, they just have to play along, and here we are.
Okay, so one: Obviously pointless from a tech POV. There is nothing that a Stripe controlled blockchain could offer that a database could not.
But then, why? Sadly, as someone who does like the ideals of true cryptocurrency, yet another way to make sure "real" crypto doesn't happen, much like what is happening to BTC.
Here's hoping (yeah, it's a long shot) people see through all of this and maybe, MAYBE, get into the actual ideals of cryptocurrency again.
Stablecoins require trusting that the coin issuer doesn't print money. This goes against the core premise of blockchain being trustless!
This is just a payment API with extra steps (all of the integrity and identity features use cryptography that works without blockchain, unless your definition of blockchain is broad enough to include git and matrix chats, then the stripe thing is a blockchain too).
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/stripe-takes-...
If Stripe’s closed-loop system scales, banks and card networks could lose significant transaction volume, fees and even merchant relationships. Merchants and customers win with lower transaction fees. This marks a very credible and large-scale effort yet to challenge the Visa and Mastercard duopoly.
Obviously not perfect and other questionable projects have stained blockchains reputation but it is a net win, no?
I am actually optimistic that, finally, there could be a convincing answer, because stripe does not strike me as the type of company that would do this without a very good reason. (I am slightly less optimistic, because the page itself does not offer an answer to this question, and instead argues for tempo against other blockchains. But only slightly.)
"EVM-compatible, built on Reth" => they're essentially building a private Ethereum fork with a fancy validator selection process.
Couldn't they just get these benefits (predictable fees, fast settlement) by ... running a database between these financial institutions?
If Stripe controls the validator set (even indirectly), then ... just a distributed database with extra steps, no?
They cut out a lot of work for themselves expecting stable coins to materialize on their own chain. It's Stripe, so maybe they are allowed to mint their own USD stable coin, but that's one coin. They might have been better off making an L2 on Ethereum. Otherwise they are going to have to run Uniswap in their EVM implementation and hope that liquidity shows up.
I can see Stripe's customers wanting to use a solution that just works and is backed by Stripe's own distributed ledger, but I can't see their customers' customers wanting to do the same. Their customers' customers are going to want liquidity to other tokens, and privacy. At this point I don't think that a payments protocol can succeed unless it provides privacy comparable to Monero, liquidity to a major L1 and its family of tokens, and of course, fast finality.
We're looking at stable coins for the following use cases:
1. Instant clearing and settlement of 'floats' & liquidity - EG moving liquidity between our network to support instant/same day payouts or instant funding of a spend card.
2. Instant cross border payments (lots of people doing this already in companies that operate multinationally). EG, our USD top-ups today take 3 days in fiat, which can cause operational issues.
3. Offering our merchants (who are typically small businesses) optionality to hold USD in countries that have volatile currencies.
I'll also note that many people forget that the cost of a payment network isn't merely the movement of money, it's also KYC, dispute resolution, fraud prevention etc...
I wonder if the tempo team has looked at AI automating dispute resolution and fraud detection/prevention 'on chain'.. The network could fund the compute required for the AI to complete these tasks.
I can hardly see any value in "yet another private blockchain" — just use a database, duh.
Does this mean these companies are about to start accepting stablecoins as payment (via Tempo?) some time in the future? Seems out of the ordinary to work with these companies otherwise.
Wouldn't that just mean that the whole schtick is to avoid regulation? If I as a regulator saw this, I'd just schedule it for my next meeting, since you want to avoid having companies doing regulatory exploits "until regulation catches up". It's Uber all over otherwise.
Sure, some people thought buying tokens was a way to become rich quick and lost money. Yes, some projects were not regulated and the regulators need to catch up. But overall progress is impressive imo.
I actually don't understand how they were allowed to exist, it's impressive really.
I'm cautious about these
they will censor you and block you in blockchain level so literally db for few big companies, lol.
So now it’s official? The other blockchains were designed for gambling?
Anyone know what this actually means? Both literally (what is Reth?) and what it means qualitatively: are Stripe’s crypto efforts competing with Ethereum or strengthening it?
Is this an actual public "blockchain"? Can anyone read it and archive all the transactions? Are there multiple validators who have to agree? Or is this really just a proprietary database?
> Attributes: High motor
What is meant by that?
[1] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tempo-xyz/aab97703-13e2-42e8-9fb9-9...
Something claiming over 20-30 tps onchain is usually a big blocker. Big blocker design is well recognized as insecure: no end user is able to run a full node locally, only datacenters are able to keep up with 100k tps load. Which diminishes entire purpose of creating a blockchain. Could have been a database with 100k tps or 3-of-4 validator multisig like Hyperledger, wouldn't matter.
> A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model.
> Protect your users by keeping important transaction details private while maintaining compliance standards.
Sounds like it actually has potential. This could enable global QR-code payments using and open, decentralized, and private system. Something like fiat cash payments, but digital. I hope that Valve is keeping track of it, for starters.
* https://www.nist.gov/blockchain
Specifically the yes/no flowchart on whether "you may have a useful blockchain use case" (Figure 6 - DHS Science & Technology Directorate Flowchart):
* https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distribut...
Asked a crypto friend how to manage it in 2025, he pointed me to a service that I could use with Google Pay. Mental. I was just walking into normie places and paying with my ill-gotten gains.
It's gone mainstream for sure.
I wonder if that's intentional or left in from debugging the animation when it was being created. As-is felt like a nice easter egg and I appreciated it being included.
Being a Stripe customer from Country XY, charging my customers in USD and getting charged a hefty fee by Stripe for the conversion when I have a payout, I wonder how this would affect their business model.
For example, in markets like Latin America, stablecoins aren’t just ‘faster payments’—they’re an escape hatch from broken financial infrastructure. That makes them feel less like a new technology experiment and more like electricity or the internet: invisible, but transformative.
The interesting question to me is: what happens once small/medium businesses start building on top of this instead of just using it for payments? Could we see the same pattern as the early web—where it started as “publishing pages” but turned into entire industries?”
The one that really stands out to me is
“ 03 :: Predictable low fees
Transform your cost structure with near-zero transaction fees that are highly predictable and can be paid in any stablecoin.”
I question why some of large companies that are named here as partners would want this.
I can't see this as a positive because of how Stripe has behaved in terms of preventing transactions in the past. Although Tempo is behaving more like a b2b model or fintech-specific orgs in this case, the shoe-drop is when they decide a particular bank, or fintech org, or product is not allowed to perform the transaction on their network after the market capture takes place.
This sounds like a „private blockchain“, which loses a lot of the advantages to me, but, if designed correctly, it may still produce a very solid and long living platform if there are many parties interested in keeping it running.
Do consider me skeptical that Stripe will actually cede enough control for this advantage to materialize since that’s just not what companies are incentivized to do.
I run e-commerce business and I’ve received bullshit chargebacks before. But I’m also a consumer and I’ve filed legitimate chargebacks before.
Related: I’ve also had my bank send money to the wrong place before.
There must be some means of reversing transactions in some cases. Some arbitration mechanism. Some dispute resolution procedure. Some means of doing escrow.
Can anyone answer this? (I'm not asking to be rhetorical or negative, just critical but inquisitive).
Yeah I can't wait to run my operations on a KYC-guarded, AML-choked blockchain in the US jurisdiction.
(and I'm saying that as a huge crypto/blockchain optimist)
Tether has now moved to Bukele's paradise El Salvador and its backing is managed by Howard Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald. Previously Tether's funds were managed by Deltec in the Caribbean, a bank with a colorful history.
For example, in markets like Latin America, stablecoins aren’t just ‘faster payments’—they’re an escape hatch from broken financial infrastructure. That makes them feel less like a new technology experiment and more like electricity or the internet: invisible, but transformative.
The interesting question to me is: what happens once small/medium businesses start building on top of this instead of just using it for payments? Could we see the same pattern as the early web—where it started as “publishing pages” but turned into entire industries?
TerraUSD (UST) NuBits DEI flexUSD
USD has been here all this time. And is a safer bet than any stable coin.
There is no technological replacement for trust. To think otherwise is a bit daft.
In my finance experience, the answer to the "why blockchain" question is settlement. Every banking system (local, international) has a settlement process.
Settlement is where bank counterparties have to tally up who owes whom, and pay each other. That process still takes time internationally, and is complex because of the parties involved.
A more concrete example (I've audited interbank settlements for a local bank in my country):
When I buy something from Amazon as a crossborder transaction with my Visa, my bank and the merchant/bank that Amazon use enter into a counterparty obligation, where in a direct way they'd have to pay each other, incl moving funds between countries. If these 2 banks are the only banks in the world, they can both tally up the transfer of funds to each other, and then pay each other the difference. That'd still take time, right?
Now, we have hundreds of counterparties, using different systems, Visa, MasterCard, Amex, local clearing houses for EFTs, etc. There's also merchants like Stripe who'll be doing the processing, central banks who also ultimately settle currencies among each other. They all have to wait for proof of funds clearing at some level.
If I'm doing an international transfer to my friend, their bank won't want to just credit their account instantly because the time it'll take for them to receive settlement of those funds isn't instant. Else they're going to pay the cost of a deposit that isn't there (let's assume my friend earns interest on positive balances).
The process is that the banks have to recon each clearing house's balance, aggregate that to a list of values like:
* Amex: owes us R200m * Visa: pay them R300m * Clearing house: etc.
Typically the bank's treasury department then effects those transfers. Don't know about other banks, but the bank I audited, it was done by a person daily, their responsibilities are to ensure those settlement aggregates are received/paid, and to resolve differences.
Beneath this person, at that bank, was a team of people who did recons all day. This was in 2012, so hopefully things changed, but I know that team still exists.
Once settlement's taken place, there's another team that verifies international settlements and then approves transfers to my local account. As a data point, it used to take me ~7 days to receive my salary from a US employer while in South Africa.
With crypto, my experience has been that settlement gets delayed, virtualised and distributed because you have a single layer (or still fewer layers across chains).
You send me USDC from wherever, we already don't involve:
* Payment processors like Visa * Central banks as no balance of payments processes are affected * Banks who need to reconcile cross-payments and settle them
Instead, if we're using an exchange (if you're using a local exchange), the funds arrive in the exchange's wallet shortly. The exchange has a constant flow of users buying and selling their local currency. They're in charge of settlement between their wallets and bank accounts.
I'll sell my USDC into my local currency ZAR, and if I withdraw it, the exchange keeps ZAR in local banks, and they send me that money immediately. My crypto salary would be in my bank as ZAR in 30-60 minutes.
Now, I said that crypto delays settlement. My exchange will eventually run out of fiat currency, or need to rebalance. They'll trade some other counterparty exchange, and settle that transaction through SWIFT/equivalent. That settlement will take the 5-7 day process. They just delayed it for their client.
I said it's virtualised because they've skipped the whole process of moving net flows and relied on a central entity, the blockchain, to do that. Ultimately it's a faster process than that backoffice of the bank.
And distributed. Every exchange or remitter has now become their own micro clearing house, and they participate in the banking system by earning their own fees, running their own process.
They only need to interact with each other at higher levels if they need to convert their USDC to US dollars. Interestingly that process happens at one place, but as long as cash and tokens move bidirectionally, the process can get relayed to the point where only a few US banks need to deal with the issuer of USDC.
Immovable object: The perennial HN hate for all things blockchain, complete TLDR energy when it comes to crypto
This should be interesting
1. We all desperately need a sane digital instant means of transferring money between “institutions” that just works
2. No-one believes that a third party solution would not end up with that third party holding everyone over a barrel (Visa but on steroids). So any simple “use Postgres” is out
3. So it’s either a trustless, open blockchain (bitcoins blockchain or possibly this Tempo). But there are huge drawbacks to The Blockchain - apart from the ratty reputation it has so far, there are problems with making a reversal of payment of both parties don’t agree, and other issues as nauseum.
I don’t get how well tempo solves any of this.
4. We end up with what I think is likely to be the solution(s). Islands of “trust groups” that replace SWIFT and its like with blockchain in a piecemeal fashion, but the cost benefit ratio is totally subsumed by the massively high costs of replacing the towers of process, regulation and software balanced on top of SWIFT etc
4.a. Or the central banks introduce their own “stablecoins ” - and people punt all the complicated bits of law and regulation and reversals over to the existing legal regulatory frameworks.
In short the ultimate problem is that sending a signal moving 1 million dollars from Kenya to Kansas is simple (wooden sticks did this a millennia ago).
The problem is a legal, cultural, social framework that all parties can trust and believe will fix their grievances. That’s basically … the global Legal framework we have now, with the solutions we have now including following court orders.
If the electronic system cannot follow the current frameworks requirements (ie the old lady did not mean to send her life savings to that wallet, get it back) then the electronic system still needs overlays that can - and there is not just a lot of complexity - there is an incredible amount of complexity
I get the feeling I’m yet again talking myself out of thinking we can have a sane digital currency for similar reasons to why we can’t vote electronically.
I’m paying for my round at the bar in cash.
Why does Stripe want to creatively ruin their reputation by venturing into crypto / blockchain?
I don't see anyone in the real world using blockchains at all.
I get AI as it was a real world paradigm shift, but I have never seen anything in this blockchain / crypto space that has reached 100-500 million users let alone 1 billion users, that isn't based on speculation.
Ah yes, the good old "permissionless" blockchain, that's 100% centralized for just the first 100 years of operation, give or take [subject to updated timelines after 100 years]
https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/number-of-cryptocurrencies-...
Bitcoin is decentralized because the sun distributes energy somewhat evenly across the globe.
The other 206701340 crypto projects, including this one, are decentralized because ... ?
From the very sparse info on the page, it seems this project does what so many other chains do to make payments faster and cheaper: They log them on a database that is synchronized across only a few computers.
In other words: I can't find any info on that page explaining how they plan to achieve decentralization.
Good luck to Stripe though. Building the network effects necessary for an L1 is very difficult.
So not decentralized at all. The only reason to not open source validators and allow the public to run their own is to make insiders rich. Another crypto grift that will mint a few millionaires before either being forgotten or merely being used as a speculative instrument.
But I had literally said that stripe should've actually ventured into and created their own cryptocurrency or something...
Tada, I might be one of the happiest person thinking that I actually really predicted something by my own observations.
here's the blog post: https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...
By what I meant most crypto, I meant anything aside from stablecoin (like gold backed/usd backed)
Now that being said, I am still a little critic as to I don't see any offical stripe message and I don't see a way on how it would be implemented?
Like one of the things that I wished in my article was this idea that someone on twitter originally asked where currently if you had money in stripe and wanted to pay it anywhere else, you had to have it enter your bank which might take 14 days and then lets say you want to give it to someone else who has stripe(think anthropic), then they would get it back again after 14 days
So someone basically asked to create something similar to a stripe card. I think that this blockchain is it, except I feel like that you could send money to anyone in a non kyc manner too via this which is again a plus point for sometimes where I feel like that in this world every transaction is usually tracked and as such something like this change is really welcomed.
Once again, can someone really explain what is going to happen in tempo's future as maybe its me who couldn't focus in such a website. I actually went and read the article that the other company that partnered with stripe (paradigm), so I just read paradigm's article: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2025/09/tempo-payments-first-blockc... and they say that it is a new incubator/partnership b/w stripe and them, but would that mean that this tempo is going to be integrated in the stripe ecosystem or no?
I always thought that stripe and stellar had some deep connections but honestly I couldn't care less about it. I don't care about these fake tokens but rather stablecoins/gold stablecoins
I honestly thought this was fake and not from stripe the first time I saw it. (I kinda still do with that domain.)
I would love for stripe to start paying appropriate VAT on transactions between their merchants and EU citizens, I've been on their ass about it for nearly a year now. I've reported multiple merchants to them which simply refused to provide an VAT invoice for any transactions. Legally, merchants outside EU are required to pay VAT on their B2C transactions if their EU transaction volume goes above a certain limit, and provide VAT invoice for B2B transactions (but with 0% VAT because it is B2B).
But unfortunately Stripe doesn't seem to have the technology to do a SUM(*) in their database, or check if an email address ends in '.de' or '.it' when they take the payment. So they simply do not give a damn if their merchants provide an invoice with the transaction or not.
Oftentimes it was the problem to actually get an invoice document which has company name, company registration number, street address, city, and tax ID. Extremely basic information which is required on all EU invoices. Many times I have submitted invoices from Stripe merchants to my tax accountant and my tax accountant told me that those are not proper invoices and to please reach out to the merchant to get EU-legal invoices.
Stripe has the technological capabilities to implement proper compliance checks, but they choose to let their merchants send you rubbish self-made PDF invoices with a big red "paid" stamp without any information or "official" Stripe invoices with total fantasy names and fantasy company information. You never know if your merchant is sitting in an embargoed country or is just some schmuck from San Francisco trying to hide their ties to a website.
If other HN users from the EU have been fighting Stripe to get EU-compliant VAT invoices for their B2B or B2C purchases, please feel free to reach out. I've been doing a big stink about this and to me it feels like a deliberate pattern of enabling their merchants to ignore EU VAT obligations.
It's really sad that my extremely positive impression of Stripe has been deeply tainted by this kind of experience across various purchases and subscriptions with Stripe merchants. I had to spend so much time pleading with them to provide proper invoices.
Actually even then I still consider it nonsense.
Blockchain's primary usefulness has been to evade regulations, and due to the rapidly changing nature of the technology, representative democracies with legitimate legal institutions have lagged behind when it comes to regulating it.
The country that wins (prevents fraudsters and scammers who exploit crypto) will be a dictatorship solely because a dictatorship is the only form of government fast enough to either rein in lawless cryptofinance, or exploit it maximally.
When enough actual value creating people who bought in to the libertarian crypto fantasy finally realize that they're slaving away to make ends meet in an economy that enshrines meme coin shills and folks who use crypto to evade the law, it will have been too late.
—-
1. https://killedbygoogle.com/