Tempo, Stripe’s new blockchain, hits $5B valuation in $500M funding round

Stripe’s blockchain project, Tempo, 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. 

Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital and Ron Conway’s SV Angel also joined the round, while Stripe and Paradigm did not contribute additional capital, a person familiar with the deal said.

The news comes less than two months after Stripe, a global payments and fintech giant, unveiled plans for its new layer-1 blockchain in partnership with Paradigm, a venture capital firm that invests in crypto and Web3 startups. 

On Sept. 4, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison wrote on X, “as the use of stablecoins (and crypto more broadly) grows across Stripe, Bridge, and Privy, we found that existing blockchains are not optimized for them.”

“We think of Tempo as the payments-oriented L1, optimized for high-scale, real-world financial applications,” he said.

Source: Patrick Collison

Though no launch date has been given for Tempo, Paradigm Chief Technology Officer Georgios Konstantopoulos said on Friday that the core team behind its open-source projects at Ithaca is joining Tempo to help build the blockchain’s payments infrastructure and scale its engineering efforts.

Source: Georgios Konstantopoulos

Related: VC Roundup: Twenty One investors inject $100M into BTC treasury, Jump Crypto backs Securitize

A competitive stablecoin market 

While Stripe hasn’t disclosed plans for a native Tempo token, the blockchain’s focus on payments infrastructure puts it in competition with several stablecoin issuers already embedded in global payment systems.

One competitor will be Circle, the issuer of USDC (USDC), a stablecoin backed 1:1 to the US dollar that is integrated with Mastercard and Visa. USDC launched in 2018 and currently has a market cap of $75.6 billion, trailing only Tether’sUSDt (USDT).

In August, Circle announced it will launch a layer-1 blockchain later this year to offer “enterprise-gradefoundation” for stablecoin payments, capital market applications, and foreign exchange.

PYUSD market cap. Source: Defillama

Much of the recent momentum in the stablecoin space follows the passage of the GENIUS Act in the US. The legislation was enacted in July to establish federal rules for stablecoin issuers. 

Stablecoins pegged to the euro are also becoming more popular, as the European Union aims to compete with US dollar-denominated tokens. 

Magazine: Japan tours on XRP Ledger, USDC and USDT payments via Grab: Asia Express