Liam Horne

Tempo

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined the team at Tempo.

Tempo is a payments-first blockchain, incubated by Stripe and Paradigm.

Stablecoins and blockchains

When Base launched in 2023 with the OP Stack, it was clear that we had hit an important milestone in the history of blockchain scaling. Now, a Fortune 500 company in the US like Coinbase can just “spin up” a blockchain and begin integrating it into their business like they would any other technology. Given Coinbase’s business development teams, its relationship to Circle, and its ability to leverage its user base, network of ramp integrations, and liquidity, Base was set up to be wildly successful — and it has been!

It was those dynamics between Circle, Coinbase, and Base that got me hooked on stablecoins that summer too. Alongside some friends, I did a lot of research into Tether on Tron and the similar dynamics those two had alongside Binance in the adoption of stablecoins outside of the US. It was the observations from that research that led me to do lots of work in understanding the business of stablecoin issuers, ramp networks, various financial services firms, exchanges, and more.

Over the past year, I’ve applied lots of those insights in the buildout of World Chain where we’ve built an EVM-based blockchain network designed for the over 30M humans that have signed up on World.

From that work, a few things became really clear to me:

Stablecoins were going to go mainstream, very soon. You could see it was imminent from the data. Stablecoins were already 70% of transaction volume across all blockchains, yet they didn’t have anywhere near that level of notoriety within the ecosystem. Now with more dashboards out like Visa’s Onchain Analytics Dashboard and excellent coverage by podcasts like Tokenized, the industry is waking up to how big of a deal stablecoins are. Importantly, regulators have become keenly aware of how important they are too.

Fintech adoption of stablecoins was coming. Outside of the blockchain space, there is already a massive shift going on within fintech. More and more applications are offering bank-like services to end consumers. Things like Starbucks’s cash product, Apple Cash, Cash App, DoorDash Crimson, Wise, and more are all rebuilding exactly the kinds of infrastructure in a closed and bespoke way that the stablecoin space is creating in an open and integrated way. It seemed inevitable that fintechs would embrace stablecoins.

Blockchains were not designed for stablecoins. Stablecoins are an emergent phenomenon of blockchains. They were created in order to be inter-exchange financial rails and to be an alternative bank for those exchanges, but the main use case driving their adoption was crypto trading. Meanwhile, blockchains themselves have always treated them as some kind of “application,” as opposed to the fundamental primitive that they should be designed for. As a result, stablecoin use cases were fragmented, expensive or had unpredictable costs, and had several user experience paper cuts for anything other than trading.

Why Tempo

In the last year or so, we’ve definitely seen stablecoins go mainstream. However, the experience for fintechs, banks, businesses, and end consumers using them is still not so great. To me, solving this problem is the most important mission for the future of the blockchain industry. We’ve spent over a decade understanding how these systems work and how they can be scaled to handle so many different kinds of use cases, all the time looking for killer applications.

Stablecoins and fintech adoption of them represent the biggest opportunity this industry has ever had to meaningfully change the world using blockchain rails. So, Tempo is an attempt to build those rails from scratch. It is leveraging over a decade of research and development by the best in the industry, and is being built in partnership with the largest payment gateway and payment processor on the internet.

Instead of focusing on trading, Tempo is being designed from the ground up to support real-world crypto use cases like remittances, global payroll, embedded accounts, agentic finance, and even microtransactions. It’s a blockchain designed for payments first, not as an afterthought.

For example, here are some of what’s going to be included at the chain level:

Importantly, Tempo is also being designed to be neutral and permissionless. It is borrowing much of the Ethereum ethos and strategy of not enshrining or embedding any particular issuer, token, or centralized entity into the network.

Looking ahead

Tempo is an independent company, with Stripe and Paradigm as first investors, and a team of 15 led by Matt Huang.

For me, this is an exciting continuation of a journey that started with payment-based state channels on Ethereum through to working on Optimism and the OP Stack. Stablecoins are already the most important use case of blockchain technology, and now it’s time to build rails that are purpose-built for them.

If you’re working on payments, remittances, or embedded fintech and want to help shape what comes next, I’d love to connect.

Learn more at tempo.xyz.