Tempo: The blockchain designed for payments incubated by Stripe and Paradigm

an article written by Matt Huang Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ Paradigm

We just announced Tempo: a payments-first blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm.

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.

Tempo is purpose-built for stablecoins and real-world payments, born from Stripe’s experience in global payments and Paradigm’s expertise in crypto tech. We are building the chain with design input from global leaders in AI, e-commerce, and financial services: Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, Visa, and more.

We are excited to further crypto’s ability to tackle real-world use cases including global payments and payroll, remittances, tokenized deposits for 24/7 settlement, embedded financial accounts, microtransactions, agentic payments, and more.

Paradigm was founded with a mission to advance the frontier of crypto, and we do this through a mix of investing, building, and researching. This helps us understand friction points and opportunities, and keeps us close to the edge of what’s possible.

Tempo is an extension of this ethos. It is a new company with its own full-time team, jointly incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. I’ll be leading Tempo, while continuing my existing role leading Paradigm alongside Alana.

At Paradigm, we expect opportunities to incubate companies like Tempo to be rare. In this case, we are excited for Tempo to help the crypto industry meet this moment of stablecoin adoption. We believe Tempo will complement existing crypto infrastructure and be a conduit for many large enterprises to come onchain, increasing adoption of crypto tools and infrastructure.