Stripe and cryptocurrency venture capital firm Paradigm have reportedly begun a public trial for their blockchain project, Tempo.
This is according to a report published Tuesday, December 9 by Bloomberg News, which indicates that the partners have opened the network to any company wishing to develop stable payment applications in the real world.
As Bloomberg notes, Stripe is part of a large group of companies entering the stablecoin space as interest in the tokens has increased. This push was fueled in part by the passage of new stablecoin legislation earlier this year, creating a framework for assets pegged to fiat currencies.
According to the report, Tempo’s latest partners include UBS and Cross River Bank, as well as prediction market company Kalshi. They join Deutsche Bank, Nubank and artificial intelligence (AI) startups OpenAI and Anthropic.
“The crypto ecosystem can be quite intimidating,” Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner of Paradigm and project lead for Tempo, told Bloomberg. “We want to fill this developer experience gap for people thinking about real-world stablecoin use cases.”
Announced in September, Tempo is designed to be a “payments-focused blockchain.” At the time, Huang argued that much of the existing crypto infrastructure was focused on commerce and that Tempo would instead be optimized for payments.
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“We are excited to strengthen crypto’s ability to address real-world use cases, including global payments and payroll, remittances, tokenized deposits for 24/7 settlement, integrated financial accounts, microtransactions, agent payments and much more,” Huang said.
As PYMNTS wrote Tuesday, many people share this view of stablecoins, which over the past 11 years have evolved from a “niche workaround for traders to the backbone of cryptocurrency markets and, increasingly, have become a candidate for global payments infrastructure.”
Today, policymakers, banks, and FinTech companies are scrambling to define the role of stablecoins as future “digital dollars for the Internet.”
But that future, the report adds, cannot be understood without examining “the messy, improvised, and sometimes catastrophic path that got stablecoins here.” Understanding how they evolve is important because it shows the tradeoffs necessary for transformation to happen: “Speed versus security. Decentralization versus efficiency. Innovation versus regulation.”
“After all, stablecoins did not arise from an elegant theory of money. They were born out of necessity in the crypto space,” the report continues. “And only time will tell whether they will eventually become just as necessary in traditional payments and financial services.”
