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.

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?”

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.

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.

     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.

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/