Tempo is a Layer 1 blockchain built for stablecoin payments, incubated by Stripe in collaboration with the crypto venture firm Paradigm. It operates as an independent entity led by Paradigm co-founder and Stripe board member Matt Huang. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison has said that existing blockchains are not optimised for the volume of stablecoin activity Stripe sees across its platform, which prompted the decision to build a purpose-built network.
Tempo raised 500 million dollars in a Series A in October 2025, led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks, at a 5 billion dollar valuation. Its public testnet (Moderato) launched in December 2025, and mainnet went live on 18 March 2026. The project has attracted a broad set of design partners across finance, fintech and technology, including Visa, Deutsche Bank, Shopify, Revolut, Nubank, DoorDash, Mastercard, UBS, OpenAI and Anthropic. These partnerships reflect Tempo's focus on both high-throughput settlement and emerging use cases such as agent-driven payments, where AI systems initiate and execute transactions.
What is Tempo looking to solve?
Stablecoin settlement is growing quickly, but it runs into structural limitations as volumes scale and institutional usage increases. Stablecoins can move value globally within seconds, yet the infrastructure beneath them is often fragmented across multiple chains, liquidity venues, and execution environments, which creates inefficiency in how payments are routed, confirmed, and finalised.
Key problems include:
- Fragmented liquidity across chains and L2s, which adds routing complexity and operational overhead.
- Variable settlement finality, where fast confirmations are not always economically or legally final.
- Operational complexity for institutions managing multi-chain treasury flows.
- A lack of dedicated financial infrastructure, since most blockchains are general-purpose rather than payment-optimised.
- Bridge and interoperability risk when moving stablecoins between ecosystems.
Tempo is designed around settlement rather than general computation. Instead of treating payments as one transaction type among many, it makes stablecoin movement a first-class primitive, optimising for predictable throughput, fast finality, and a consistent execution environment. In practice, this means it functions as a dedicated settlement rail for digital dollars and tokenized assets, with the speed and global accessibility of blockchain infrastructure.
Under the hood
Tempo is built for the core requirements of financial infrastructure: speed, certainty, and scale. Its main technical characteristics:
- Execution on the Reth SDK, Paradigm's Rust-based EVM client, rather than a Geth fork. It is fully EVM-compatible, so existing Solidity tooling, Foundry, Hardhat, and Ethereum JSON-RPC methods work without modification.
- Consensus via Simplex BFT, a Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol implemented through Commonware, producing deterministic finality in roughly half a second.
- A permissioned validator set, secured without staking, a bond, or a native token.
- Stablecoin-native gas: fees are paid in USDC, USDT or pathUSD rather than a volatile native asset.
- Multi-asset support for stablecoins and tokenized assets, enabling FX, treasury operations, and cross-border settlement in a single environment.
Each component maps to a specific payment requirement. EVM compatibility reduces integration overhead, Simplex BFT provides fast deterministic settlement, and dedicated capacity keeps fees and latency stable under load. Together these choices position Tempo as a settlement layer for digital payments where predictability and performance are the priorities.
MPP and the TIP-20 standard
MPP (Multi-Payment Protocol) is a design layer that lets a single transaction define multiple payment flows at once. Rather than one sender paying one recipient, an MPP transaction can split payments across several parties, routes, and assets in a single atomic execution. For a payments chain this supports merchant settlement splits (merchant, processor, affiliate), automatic fee routing, and multi-currency settlement without separate transactions or off-chain reconciliation. Value distribution is handled at the protocol level, so all participants are paid deterministically within the same block.
TIP-20 is Tempo's token interface standard, comparable in spirit to ERC-20, defining how fungible tokens behave on the network. It specifies the rules for transfers, balances, approvals, and interactions so that wallets, applications, and payment systems can support any token built on Tempo. TIP-20 integrates with Tempo's payments model, including fee abstraction and reward and distribution mechanisms, so tokens interact directly with the MPP system and the network's stablecoin-denominated fee environment. In practice, TIP-20 defines how individual tokens behave, while MPP defines how payments across multiple recipients are orchestrated in a single transaction.
Kiln and Tempo
Tempo launched with a permissioned validator set, with external validators including Visa, Stripe, and Zodia Custody (Standard Chartered). The network is expected to expand validator participation toward a more open model as it matures. Validator participation is currently by whitelist, based on a direct relationship with the Tempo team.
Kiln operates enterprise-grade validator infrastructure across major blockchain networks, with a track record in institutional staking and validation. For institutions evaluating participation in Tempo, Kiln is positioned to support validator operations while reducing the complexity of running blockchain infrastructure in-house.
Beyond validators, Kiln is preparing to make Tempo-native yield strategies accessible to institutions and distributors through Railnet, so funds can be deployed on Tempo. Reach out to us to learn more.
About Kiln
Kiln is the leading staking and digital asset rewards management platform, enabling institutional customers to earn rewards on their digital assets, or to whitelabel earning functionality into their products. Kiln runs validators on all major PoS blockchains, with over $11 billion in crypto assets being programmatically staked and running over 5% of the Ethereum network on a multi-client, multi-cloud, and multi-region infrastructure. Kiln also provides a validator-agnostic suite of products for fully automated deployment of validators and reporting and commission management, enabling custodians, wallets, and exchanges to streamline staking or DeFi operations across providers. Kiln is SOC2 Type 2 certified.
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