Stripe and Paradigm are plotting to launch a new platform that some have likened to a “Libra that lived.”
The chain, Tempo, aims to bring stablecoin-powered payments onchain at a scale Stripe is uniquely positioned to deliver.
The announcement came with heavyweight design partners, such as Visa, Deutsche Bank, OpenAI, Shopify, and the sketching of an architecture: not an Ethereum layer-2, but a new L1, optimized for predictable fees, sub-second finality, gas-in-stables, and 100,000+ TPS.
The Ethereum community was mostly nonplussed.
Why Tempo is an L1 — and why should we care
Paradigm’s Matt Huang laid out the case. “Tempo will be a permissionless chain. On day 1, anyone will be able to deploy a token, and anyone will be able to transact on the chain…We’ll start with a permissioned validator set to get going and decentralize further from there.”
Huang framed the decision to go L1, not L2, as both technical and political.
“Building a network for global payments will require bringing together thousands of partners that may not trust us, or Stripe, or anyone as a platform. We think a decentralized validator set — for the chain itself — is a necessary requirement for those partners, and to ensure that the chain is unquestionably neutral in the long run.”
On its face, that sounds a lot like Ethereum, and the new chain will be built on Reth and therefore EVM-compatible. But Huang also cited UX features L2s don’t currently offer natively — like multi-token gas support via an enshrined AMM, payments-specific lanes, sub-second finality, and with opt-in privacy features.
Paradigm has been a major Ethereum proponent and develops the Reth execution client, boosting the network’s client diversity. That detail drew particular attention from Ethereum core devs, since just days earlier, a critical bug in Reth caused synced nodes to stall. Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos called it a “brutal moment, but ultimately one we learn from and get stronger.”
On Ethereum, the bug was annoying but not catastrophic, because Reth is just one of many. For Tempo, launching with Reth as its primary execution engine, an episode like that could plausibly halt the chain.
Critics quickly zeroed in on what they saw as Tempo’s contradictions. “Where is the Ethereum alignment?” wrote Ethereum core dev Preston Van Loon.
Paradigm has already tried the L2 route with Blast, sometimes thought of as “Paradigm’s L2” due to its lead role in Blast’s $20M raise, so it’s possible the VC firm could have ruled out building on Ethereum to avoid a conflict.
(A Paradigm spokesperson declined to comment specifically for this story.)
At stake is more than just branding. Tempo’s design decisions reignited long-running questions about whether L2s can deliver the UX and institutional trust required for real-world payments. But they also raised alarms about what happens when corporate players reinvent blockchain infrastructure outside the neutral, credibly decentralized systems Ethereum has tried to protect.
It’s bound to be a years-long battle, but as Yuval Kogler put it: “The relative success of the various blockchains will be a direct referendum on the market value of decentralization.”
The corp chains critique
To many longtime crypto builders, Tempo echoes the dreams — and mistakes — of Facebook’s Libra. Christian Catalini, one of Libra’s original architects, questioned whether any corporate player could deliver on the promise of neutrality.
“Would a sane competitor bet its future on Stripe’s promise not to eventually favor its own products?”
Catalini, co-founder alongside David Marcus of Lightspark, a payments-infrastructure company building on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, went further: “As long as there is a single throat to choke — or a committee of them — you can’t truly rewire the system. Worse, any network with an architect is living on borrowed time.”
Omid Malekan, a crypto author and early educator, was equally blunt: “I can’t believe I still have to say this in the year 2025, but let me explain once again why permissioned chains like Tempo (or Canton or ARC or any other corporate chain) are likely to fail.” His critique centers on liability: if validators are known and permissioned, they can be sued, censored, or compelled to roll back the chain.
Still, not everyone saw Tempo as a retreat into safe corporatism. Nick van Eck argued Stripe is unlikely to be merely experimenting, but launching a full-stack payments competitor to Visa.
“Tempo is a clear shot across the bow [announcing] that they are trying to build the next generation Visa network,” said van Eck, calling Huang’s ode to neutrality tantamount to “gaslighting everyone”: “They are openly declaring war against everyone building in stablecoins, the payment networks, and the banks.”
In van Eck’s view, Stripe is moving fast because it has to — before incumbents cut them off. Agora is one of those stablecoins seeking to grow distribution.
“The opportunity up for grabs here is enormous,” van Eck said. “Probably $1T+ in enterprise value to be won or lost if we look a decade down the road.”
From the market-structure angle, there’s a strategic read on stablecoin rails themselves, according to Laurent Benayoun, CEO of Acheron Trading.
“Having control over the infrastructure powering payments and RWAs will increase the revenue and influence of stablecoin issuers,” Benayoun told Blockworks. “That said, two things will ultimately matter: how private issuers will tackle creating public chains, and as a consequence which will receive the highest degree of adoption post consolidation of that niche.”
A fresh look at fast finality
Tempo may be shipping fast finality, but Ethereum researchers made it clear they’re working on it too, and faster than critics might think.
Barnabé Monnot, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, posted a breakdown of ongoing work to shorten slot times, expose fast confirmation rules in clients, and pursue more aggressive finality gadgets.
ZKsync’s Alex Gluchowski responding to Huang’s Tempo preview, noted “the only serious technical argument in this post is fast L1 finality — something we as L2s can neither fix nor mitigate.” That’s the sort of dependency chains like Circle’s Arc also seek to avoid.
Vitalik Buterin joined the thread to support Monnot’s work: “These are good ideas! Most of them are delta-neutral (in the sense of the δ network latency assumption), which is even better.” In distributed-systems terms, δ (delta) is the maximum time messages take to propagate; calling proposals “delta-neutral” signals they don’t require faster networks or tighter validator clustering to be safe.
The real trick, Buterin caveated, is whether Ethereum can maintain geographic and economic decentralization while cutting time to finality.
“Revolution” or “failed coup”?
The emergence of Tempo is less a rejection of Ethereum than a test of its pace. Stripe isn’t launching Tempo to provoke the Ethereum community, though it may have that consequence.
Ethereum still has the network effects, and decentralization strengths, like client diversity, and credible neutrality. Tempo will have distribution, product polish, and a measure of institutional trust. The challenge for Ethereum is to meet the moment technically — fast confirmations, better L2 UX, cleaner interop — before Tempo or any other major fintech player captures the payments layer outright.
As Catalini warned, if the world settles on corporate chains like Tempo, “the crypto experiment was not a revolution, but a failed coup.”
But as stablecoin adoption grows, Tempo may well serve as a catalyst for Ethereum rather than competition.
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Source: https://blockworks.co/news/tempo-stripe-paradigm-planned-l1
