From acquiring Bridge to developing its own Tempo chain, how does Stripe reshape the trillion-dollar payment empire?

By Karen Z, Foresight News

Fintech giant Stripe is accelerating its layout in the stablecoin and payment fields.

A now-removed job posting revealed a secret collaboration with crypto venture capital firm Paradigm - the two parties are jointly building a high-performance payment-specific blockchain called Tempo.

This move is a key step in Stripe's continued layout in the stablecoin market, reflecting its ambition to reshape the global payment system and even the financial landscape.

Tempo: A Layer 1 blockchain focused on payments

According to a recently removed product marketing job posting from Fortune magazine and the Blockchain Association website, Tempo is positioned as a "high-performance, payment-focused blockchain (Layer 1)" and is currently under confidentiality. The team currently has five people and is looking to hire its first product marketing person.

The position requires applicants to be familiar with the fields of fintech/payments or cryptocurrencies and have "marketing experience for Fortune 500 companies," suggesting that its target customer group is large enterprises.

According to Fortune magazine, citing four people familiar with the matter, Tempo is a Layer 1 that uses a programming language compatible with Ethereum.

This technical choice not only ensures independence, but also lowers the application threshold by leveraging the mature developer resources of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Notably, Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang is a member of the Stripe board of directors and also participated in an early investment in Privy, a crypto wallet company acquired by Stripe. Paradigm led Privy's $18 million Series A funding round in November 2023, at which time Matt Huang also joined the Privy board of directors. In March 2025, Privy announced the completion of a $15 million funding round led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Paradigm, and Coinbase. This deep integration laid the foundation for the collaboration between Paradigm and Stripe.

In fact, in February of this year, Matt Huang said that Paradigm was in discussions with some of the world's largest companies to help them develop stablecoin strategies, such as faster global expansion or easier fund custody.

From acquisitions and partnerships to in-house development: Stripe's stablecoin strategy evolves

The development of Tempo is a continuation of Stripe's stablecoin strategy. From acquiring infrastructure to developing its own underlying technology, its layout is logically clear and progressive.

Step 1: Secure the core of stablecoin infrastructure — Bridge

In October 2024, Stripe acquired the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for US$1.1 billion, its largest acquisition in history.

Bridge allows businesses and developers to seamlessly integrate stablecoin payments and supports convenient transfers between fiat currencies and stablecoins.

Bridge has attracted numerous customers, including SpaceX. For example, SpaceX uses Bridge to remit funds from Starlink sales in Argentina, Nigeria, and other markets. Mexican neobank DollarApp uses Bridge to help individuals receive US dollar payments from payroll providers like Deel. Artim uses Bridge to pay employees across Latin America.

As Stripe co-founder John Collison said at Stripe Sessions 2025 in May, "Stablecoins can truly enable borderless finance. Comparing the payment transaction volume growth of Stripe in its first two years with that of Bridge in its first two years, we can see that Bridge has shown a more significant exponential growth trend, which also indirectly confirms the huge potential of stablecoins."

Step 2: Open up offline payment scenarios and launch stablecoin financial accounts

In addition, on April 30, Stripe's Bridge also cooperated with Visa to launch a stablecoin card issuance product. Developers using Bridge can now programmatically issue stablecoin-related Visa cards in multiple countries/regions through a single API integration.

Businesses and individuals can use their stablecoin balances for everyday purchases anywhere Visa is accepted. When a cardholder makes a purchase, Bridge deducts funds from their stablecoin balance and converts them into fiat currency, while the merchant continues to receive payment in the local currency.

After acquiring Bridge, Stripe officially announced the launch of a stablecoin financial account on May 8, aiming to provide global companies with more efficient and convenient cross-border payment and fund management solutions.

According to Stripe's official documentation, Stablecoin Financial Accounts allow users to hold USDC and USDB stablecoin balances and send and receive funds using stablecoins and traditional financial channels (such as ACH, SEPA, and wire transfers). This means that funds from stablecoin balances can be transferred to external bank accounts or crypto wallets. If the recipient is an external bank account, the amount received is automatically converted based on the current exchange rate, greatly enhancing the convenience and flexibility of fund transfers. This service is also powered by the Bridge platform acquired by Stripe.

Step 3: Complete the user-side entrance - Privy

In June 2025, Stripe acquired Privy, a developer of embedded crypto wallets.

Privy's authentication and wallet infrastructure allows developers, projects, or companies to register wallets for users, launch self-hosted wallets for users, and securely sign transactions through their apps. Privy simplifies cryptocurrency usage by embedding wallets within applications.

Under the hood, Privy combines a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) with distributed key sharding to provide a seamless, secure, and scalable wallet.

In June of this year, Privy released data showing that it has over 75 million accounts in over 180 countries/regions, with over 85 million monthly transactions and over 500 million RPC calls. Privy's clients include major crypto projects such as Hyperliquid, Farcaster, Jupiter, Zora, pump.fun, and Blackbird.

Step 4: Self-developed underlying blockchain - Tempo closed loop

The development of Tempo is now an important piece of the puzzle in Stripe's stablecoin layout.

By developing its own Layer 1 blockchain, Stripe is able to control the core processing links of stablecoin transactions, forming a complete closed loop with its previous layout: Bridge focuses on stablecoin infrastructure construction and enterprise integration, and is responsible for enterprise stablecoin integration and issuance; Privy provides user wallet access; stablecoin financial accounts and Visa cards connect the funds flow scenario; Tempo carries the underlying transaction processing.

Stripe's ultimate goal is to fully control the entire stablecoin payment process through the Tempo blockchain.

Stripe's Deeper Ambitions

Stripe's vast customer network provides a natural landing scenario for its stablecoin ecosystem.

According to the 2024 annual letter released by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and co-founder John Collison in February of this year, total business payments on the Stripe platform will reach $1.4 trillion in 2024, a 38% year-over-year increase, equivalent to 1.3% of global GDP. Stripe firmly believes that technologies like stablecoins and artificial intelligence are poised to reshape the economic landscape. The Stripe ecosystem spans every dimension of the economic landscape, from industry giants (half of the Fortune 100 use Stripe) to fast-growing companies (80% of the Forbes Cloud 100 and 78% of the Forbes AI 50 are Stripe customers) to emerging startups (one in six newly registered Delaware companies is registered through Stripe Atlas).

Stripe has previously stated that it is becoming the preferred platform for building stablecoin applications and has been in dialogue with many top companies around the world to help them develop stablecoin strategies, such as accelerating global expansion or simplifying fund custody.

If Stripe's stablecoin ecosystem is fully formed, it may become a key hub for the integration of Web2 and Web3 finance, further consolidating its position as a trillion-dollar payment empire.

Stripe's ambitions extend beyond improving payment efficiency. In its 2024 annual letter, the company stated that stablecoins could become "an upgraded version of the Eurodollar"—just as the Eurodollar system provides offshore dollar services for non-US businesses, stablecoins enable global dollar circulation with lower barriers to entry. Furthermore, stablecoin issuers could become significant buyers of US Treasury bonds, further bolstering the dollar's strength.