Stripe's Tempo Blockchain Achieves $5B Valuation After $500M Funding Round
The newly launched Tempo blockchain by Stripe raises $500 million, reaching a valuation of $5 billion shortly after its announcement.
Stripe has successfully raised $500 million in a Series A funding round led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital, resulting in a $5 billion valuation for its payments-oriented blockchain, Tempo. This funding event occurred less than two months after the project’s initial announcement.
In addition to the leading investors, notable firms such as Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, and SV Angel have joined the funding round. However, Stripe and Paradigm chose not to invest additional capital in this deal, as stated by an insider.
The announcement follows a recent unveiling of Stripe’s new layer-1 blockchain created to facilitate stablecoin and real-world payments, developed in collaboration with Paradigm, a venture capital firm focused on crypto and Web3 startups.
On September 4, stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison noted on Twitter that, “as the use of stablecoins (and crypto broadly) expands across Stripe, Bridge, and Privy, we’ve recognized that existing blockchains aren’t suited for our needs.”
He further described Tempo as a payments-focused L1, designed for high-scale, real-world financial applications.
The launch date for Tempo remains unannounced, but Georgios Konstantopoulos, CTO of Paradigm, mentioned that the core team from Ithaca, who worked on open-source projects, is set to join Tempo to strengthen its payment infrastructure and enhance engineering capabilities.
With no official plans disclosed for issuing a native Tempo token, this new blockchain’s aim is to compete with various established stablecoin issuers already integrated into worldwide payment systems. For instance, Circle, which issues USDC (a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the US dollar), and others like Mastercard and Visa, add to the competitive landscape.
Moreover, much of the recent progress in the stablecoin market has been shaped by the successful passage of the GENIUS Act in the US, which sets forth federal regulations for stablecoin creators.
As interest in euro-pegged stablecoins surges, the European Union works toward competing directly with US dollar-denominated tokens in increasingly diversified global payment ecosystems.
