Stripe’s blockchain initiative, Tempo, has successfully drawn $500 million in a Series A funding round, which was led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks. This funding values the payments-oriented platform at $5 billion, as noted by Fortune.
Notably, Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Ron Conway’s SV Angel also participated, while Stripe and Paradigm opted out of additional investments, according to an insider familiar with the transaction. This news follows closely after Stripe’s unveiling of its layer-1 blockchain aimed at stablecoin and real-world payments less than two months ago in collaboration with Paradigm, a venture capital entity that specializes in crypto and Web3 startups.
On September 4, Stripe’s CEO, Patrick Collison, mentioned on X: “As the adoption of stablecoins and cryptocurrency grows across Stripe, Bridge, and Privy, we identified that existing blockchains aren’t optimized for these transactions.”
“We view Tempo as the payment-centric L1, tailored for large-scale, real-world financial applications,” he added.
No specific launch date for Tempo has been revealed yet; however, Paradigm’s CTO, Georgios Konstantopoulos, disclosed on Friday that the foundational team from their open-source projects at Ithaca is joining Tempo to aid in building the blockchain’s payment framework and enhance its engineering capabilities.
A Competitive Stablecoin Market
While Stripe has not yet announced a dedicated Tempo token, the focus of the blockchain on payment infrastructure positions it as a contender among numerous established stablecoin issuers in existing payment ecosystems.
Circle, the entity behind USDC (a stablecoin tied 1:1 to the US dollar), will be one of its competitors. USDC, integrated with Mastercard and Visa, launched in 2018 and currently boasts a market capitalization of $75.6 billion, outpaced only by Tether’s USDT. In August, Circle declared their plans to debut a layer-1 blockchain this year to provide a robust foundation for stablecoin transactions, capital market functions, and foreign exchange.
Much of the recent activity in the stablecoin sector is attributed to the approval of the GENIUS Act in the U.S., which was enacted to set federal guidelines for stablecoin issuers. Furthermore, stablecoins linked to the euro are gaining traction as the European Union strives to compete with dollar-denominated tokens.
