Stripe and Paradigm Unveil Permissionless Layer 1 Blockchain, Tempo

Fintech giant Stripe today officially announced its partnership with venture capital firm Paradigm and revealed that the firms are launching a Layer 1 blockchain, Tempo.

Tempo is an Ethereum-Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain designed for high-volume payment use cases with a built-in stablecoin automated market maker (AMM), and claims high throughput, low latency, and opt-in private transactions. According to an X post from Tempo’s official account, the chain will feature 100,000+ transactions per second (TPS) and sub-second finality.

The news of the partnership and plans to launch Tempo were first reported by Fortune a little over a month ago, citing anonymous sources and a job listing, but the firms had yet to confirm the move.

According to its website, Tempo will be a neutral and permissionless blockchain that is “open for anyone to build on.” However it is worth noting that the network validators will be bootstrapped with Tempo’s design partners before transitioning to a permissionless model in the future.

The specific partners that will be running the nodes are undisclosed, but could include the likes of artificial intelligence leaders like OpenAI or Anthropic, as well as payments and banking giants such as Visa, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Chartered, according to the website.

Stripe’s Crypto Push

Stripe is one of the world leaders in payments, and processed $1.4 trillion in payments volume in 2024. Stripe’s most recent raise in February valued the company at $91 billion, and the infrastructure provider has been diving headfirst into the world of stablecoins in 2025.

The company introduced its Stablecoin Financial Accounts in May, which allows users to send, receive, and store stablecoins in Stripe. However, North America and Western Europe are geoblocked from the feature.

Tempo may provide users in geoblocked locations a Stripe-backed alternative to Stablecoin Financial Accounts, and due to Tempo’s permissionless vision, could see DeFi applications launched on the chain in the future.

Matt Huang, the founder of Paradigm, shared the announcement on social media, commenting: “We’re building Tempo with principles of decentralization and neutrality. That includes: Stablecoin neutrality: anyone can issue a stablecoin, and any stablecoin can be used for payments/gas. Independent and diverse validator set, with a roadmap toward a permissionless model.”

Stripe CEO, Patrick Collison, also commented on this news in an X post, writing:

“We hope that Tempo makes it easier for things like payment acceptance, global payouts, remittances, microtransactions, tokenized deposits, agentic payments, and more, to move onchain.”

Last month, both Google and USDC issuer Circle announced that they were launching their own L1 chains.