Stripe’s blockchain project Tempo has raised $500 million in a Series A round led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital, valuing the payments-focused network at $5 billion, according to Fortune magazine.
Sequoia Capital, Rivit Capital and Ron Conway’s SV Angel also participated in the round, but Stripe and Paradigm did not provide additional capital, according to people familiar with the deal.
The news comes less than two months after global payments and fintech giant Stripe announced plans for a new layer-1 blockchain in partnership with Paradigm, a venture capital firm that invests in cryptocurrency and Web3 startups.
On September 4, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison wrote for X: “As the use of stablecoins (and broader cryptocurrencies) increases across Stripe, Bridge, and Privy, we are finding that existing blockchains are not optimized for them.”
“We think of Tempo as a payments-oriented L1 optimized for large-scale, real-world financial applications,” he said.
A launch date for Tempo has not been disclosed, but Paradigm Chief Technology Officer Georgios Konstantopoulos said Friday that the core team behind the Ithaca open source project will join Tempo to help build blockchain payments infrastructure and expand engineering efforts.
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Competitive stablecoin market
Stripe has not disclosed plans for a native Tempo token, but the blockchain’s focus on payment infrastructure puts it in competition with multiple stablecoin issuers that are already integrated into global payment systems.
One of its competitors is Circle, the issuer of USDC (USDC), a stablecoin backed 1:1 with the US dollar that is integrated with Mastercard and Visa. USDC was launched in 2018 and currently has a market capitalization of $75.6 billion, second only to Tether’s USDt (USDT).
In August, Circle announced it would launch a layer 1 blockchain later this year to provide an “enterprise-grade foundation” for stablecoin payments, capital markets applications, and foreign exchange.
Much of the recent momentum in the stablecoin space has followed the passage of the GENIUS Act in the United States. The law was enacted in July to establish federal regulations for stablecoin issuers.
Stablecoins pegged to the euro are also gaining popularity as the European Union looks to compete with USD-denominated tokens.
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