Stripe Reportedly Developing ‘Tempo’ Payments Blockchain with Paradigm

Stripe, the $91.5 billion financial technology giant, is reportedly working on a payments-focused Layer 1 blockchain named Tempo with Paradigm. Paradigm is a crypto venture capital firm. The project, which remains hidden, was uncovered through a now-deleted product marketing job listing on the Blockchain Association’s careers board describing Tempo as a “high-performance, payments-focused blockchain.”

The job listing was taken down shortly after Fortune contacted Stripe for confirmation. Both Stripe and Paradigm have yet to comment publicly on the project, but its discovery comes amid Stripe’s deepening investment in cryptocurrency infrastructure over the past year.

Stripe Developing “Tempo” with Paradigm

In October 2024, Stripe announced a $1.1 billion purchase of stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge. This was its largest acquisition to date and was aimed at enabling the issuance and integration of stablecoins. That deal closed in February 2025. Just four months later, in June, Stripe acquired digital asset wallet developer Privy for an undisclosed price, further strengthening its crypto capabilities.

An exclusive blockchain like Tempo could give Stripe greater control over the “settlement layer” of payment processing. Payment-specific blockchains often face challenges in transaction throughput and cost predictability, particularly during high-volume periods.

Ryan Yoon, senior analyst at Tiger Research, said, “Tempo could offer deterministic settlement times and fixed fee structures for enterprise-scale payments. It also removes dependency risk. If a payment fails due to congestion or validator issues, customers blame Stripe — not Ethereum or Polygon.”

Direct ownership of a Layer 1 blockchain would allow Stripe to control uptime, processing speeds, and transaction fee consistency, factors critical for high-volume merchants. However, experts note that differentiating Tempo from existing high-performance blockchains may be challenging.

Beyond performance, some observers believe Tempo’s success will depend on addressing privacy and user experience gaps in on-chain payments. “There’s no balance blinding and no PayPal-like functionality that preserves privacy while staying decentralized,” said Mehow Pospieszalski, CEO of American Fortress. He pointed to “balance blinding,” technology that hides a sender’s account balances from recipients, combined with dynamic address generation tied to human-readable names as features that could make Tempo stand out.

Merchant distribution could be another competitive edge. “Most blockchains have either throughput or decentralization, rarely both, but almost none have merchant distribution at Stripe’s scale,” said Dan Dadybayo, research lead at Unstoppable Wallet. He suggested the “real differentiator” would be if Stripe made Tempo open enough for other payment providers to build on, rather than keeping it as a closed ecosystem. While details remain scarce, Tempo’s development signals Stripe’s ambition to not only integrate blockchain technology but to own a foundational payments infrastructure layer, a move that could reshape how digital transactions are processed globally.