Skip to content
Wiki
Home / Wiki / projects / Tempo

Tempo

Project

Tempo is the payments-first, EVM-compatible Layer 1 incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, announced 4 September 2025 and live on mainnet since 18 March 2026, led by Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang as CEO. The design is stablecoin-native and deliberately coin-neutral: there is no native token, transaction fees are payable in any supported stablecoin through an enshrined fee automated market maker, and the chain is built on Reth with a design target above 100,000 transactions per second, sub-second finality, a dedicated payment lane, and memo fields for payment metadata (Tempo). For this knowledge base Tempo matters twice over: it is the settlement-layer bet of the most vertically integrated stablecoin stack in Western payments, and it carries Asia's most concrete stablecoin-payments proof point to date, the Coupang and Woori Bank KRW settlement test of July 2026.

Design, funding, and governance

The partner roster reads as a deliberate coalition across payments, banking, commerce and AI. Design partners at announcement: Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa; Klarna, Kalshi, Mastercard and UBS joined by the December 2025 testnet. Tempo raised a USD 500 million Series A at a reported USD 5 billion valuation in October 2025, led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks with Sequoia, Ribbit and SV Angel participating, with Stripe and Paradigm sitting the round out (Fortune). The validator set is permissioned with a stated roadmap toward permissionless operation; the first external validators, added April 2026, are Stripe, Visa, and Zodia Custody, the Standard Chartered-built custodian, which puts an Asia-anchored bank group inside the chain's operational set from the start.

What runs on it

  • Issuance. KlarnaUSD, issued through Bridge in November 2025, was the first financial-institution stablecoin on the chain. Bridge added Tempo as a supported network in April 2026, and Tempo's CEO has said OUSD, the Open Standard consortium coin, will be natively issued on Tempo from day one, while press coverage of the consortium emphasises Solana; both may prove true and the launch-chain list remains unpublished.
  • Agent payments. The Machine Payments Protocol, co-authored by Tempo, Stripe and Visa and released open source with mainnet on 18 March 2026, targets agent-initiated transactions in stablecoins and conventional rails, positioned alongside Coinbase's x402, which Stripe also supports (Stripe).
  • Treasury yield. BlackRock's BUIDL was integrated via Securitize for yield on idle balances in 2026 (Securitize).
  • Stripe money movement. Stripe's roadmap lists sending money on Tempo reaching general availability in Q4 2026; Tempo is not yet the default settlement layer for Stripe stablecoin flows, and claims that it is run ahead of the disclosed state.

The Asia proof point

Coupang and Woori Bank completed South Korea's first end-to-end KRW stablecoin payment and settlement proof of concept on Tempo, announced 27 July 2026: a Coupang Eats order paid in a KRW-denominated stablecoin, merchant settlement executed in real time on the chain, and Woori handling the fiat on-ramp and off-ramp legs (Tempo). The issuer of the KRW stablecoin was not disclosed. The timing reads as deliberate positioning ahead of Korea's won-stablecoin legislation, covered in the won-stablecoin theme, and the parties described a continuing strategic partnership as the framework develops. Alongside Zodia in the validator set and Standard Chartered and Coupang among design partners, the chain's Asia surface is more operational than most Western stablecoin infrastructure a year into existence.

The competitive frame

Tempo's closest structural comparison is Circle's Arc, and the contrast is philosophical: Tempo is stablecoin-neutral with no native token and fees in any supported coin, while Arc anchors to USDC with a separate ARC token, its public mainnet slated for 16 September 2026 with founding validators including Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock and DTCC. Visa has added both Tempo and Arc to its stablecoin settlement programme, hedging across rival chains the way the card networks hedge across everything in this market. Tether's Plasma and Tron compete for the same stablecoin-payments flows from the crypto-native side.

Recent moves

  • 27 Jul 2026Coupang and Woori Bank's KRW stablecoin settlement proof of concept, Korea's first end to end (Tempo).
  • 30 Jun 2026Tempo's CEO stated OUSD will be natively issued on Tempo at launch.
  • 21 Apr 2026Stablecoin advisory unit launched with forward-deployed engineers; named clients include DoorDash, Fifth Third Bank and Coastal Community Bank (Fortune).
  • Apr 2026First external validators added: Stripe, Visa, Zodia Custody.
  • 18 Mar 2026Mainnet launch with the Machine Payments Protocol (Fortune).
  • 9 Dec 2025Public testnet with Klarna, Kalshi, Mastercard and UBS added as partners (CoinDesk).
  • 17 Oct 2025USD 500 million Series A at a reported USD 5 billion valuation.

Open questions

  • The KRW stablecoin issuer in the Coupang and Woori proof of concept.
  • OUSD's actual day-one chain list.
  • Mainnet transaction volumes, which have not been disclosed.
  • Whether Coupang holds an investment in Tempo, as commentary suggests but no primary source confirms.