Tempo, a highly anticipated layer 1 blockchain, took a major step toward launch on Tuesday with the release of its public testnet.
“What started as a vision for a payments-focused blockchain is now a working network tested by many of the world’s leading companies,” the company said in a press release.
Backed by Stripe and crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, Tempo made waves when it was unveiled in September.
This is partly because Stripe’s position as one of the world’s leading payment processors ensures that Tempo will enjoy wide distribution when it launches in 2026.
With a valuation of $106 billion, Stripe was the largest private fintech company in September, according to FinTech Magazine. In 2024, it processed $1.4 trillion in payments volume, “the equivalent of approximately 1.3% of global GDP,” according to the company. Its customers included half of the Fortune 100 companies, including NVIDIA, PepsiCo and Comcast.
And Tempo has attracted several highly respected crypto researchers, executives, and software engineers, such as former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist, former Optimism Labs CEO Liam Horne, and Rice University professor Mallesh Pai.
“We ourselves have been disappointed with the utility of crypto payments for much of the last decade,” Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, wrote on Hacker News earlier this year.
However, he changed his mind after seeing how companies found the real utility of stablecoins.
“None of these companies use crypto because it’s crypto or for speculative profit,” Collison said. “They are engaged in real financial activities.”
Tempo aims to offer low-cost payment transactions – its goal is a tenth of a cent per transaction – without the congestion that can hamper general-purpose blockchains.
“Payments guarantee reserved block space at the protocol level,” Tempo said on Tuesday. “They do not compete with other traffic like NFT coins, liquidations, or high-frequency contract calls.”
The permissionless blockchain will also feature a built-in decentralized exchange optimized for stablecoins and tokenized deposits.
The Tempo client is open source, allowing anyone to run a node, according to the company. Although the testnet started with four company-managed validators, Tempo will expand its set of validators to include its design partners before ultimately moving to a permissionless model.
On Tuesday, Tempo announced that it had added UBS, Mastercard and Kalshi, among others, as new “design partners.”
Initial design partners included Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered and Visa.
Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ DeFi correspondent based in New York. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.
