Original Title: "Paradigm's Favorite Tempo Launches Testnet, Can It Have a 'Big Hair' This Time?"
Original Author: Nicky, Foresight News
Tempo is a brand new Layer 1 blockchain developed in collaboration between fintech company Stripe and crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, with a core focus on providing dedicated infrastructure for large-scale payment scenarios. The project opened its public testnet in December this year and plans to launch its mainnet in 2026.
Tempo is not a general-purpose smart contract platform; its design has been optimized around the core scenario of "payments" from the beginning, aiming to address the high costs and low efficiency faced by existing blockchains when supporting payment applications like stablecoins.
Tempo is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, meaning developers can seamlessly migrate existing Ethereum tools and applications. One of its core innovations is the introduction of a native token standard called "TIP-20," specifically designed for stablecoins and payment tokens, serving as the basis for network fees, payment channels, and other functions.
Unlike most public chains, Tempo does not have a native token. Network transaction fees (including gas fees) can be paid directly using stablecoins, provided that the stablecoin is natively issued under the TIP-20 standard and has sufficient liquidity in the on-chain fee AMM. The official has set a fixed base fee rate, rather than the dynamic model used by Ethereum's EIP-1559, aiming to keep the cost of a single TIP-20 transfer below $0.001, with fees going directly to the block validators.
One of Tempo's core innovations is its native transaction type, Tempo Transactions. This design introduces batch transactions, concurrent execution, fee delegation, scheduled payments, and modern authentication mechanisms based on Passkey (such as biometrics) around real payment needs. These features are intended to support on-chain scenarios such as payroll, subscription payments, and enterprise-level bulk payments, while reducing the complexity for application providers in terms of user experience and operations. Its block finality time is approximately 0.6 seconds, providing certainty in settlement for payments.
In mid-October 2025, Tempo completed a $500 million Series A funding round, with a post-money valuation of about $5 billion. This round was led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital, with participation from firms like Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, and SV Angel, while Stripe and Paradigm themselves did not appear on the investor list.
In terms of ecosystem development, Tempo announced its first batch of infrastructure partners in September, covering wallets, deposit and withdrawal channels, compliance, development tools, interoperability, and stablecoin-related services, with participants including MetaMask and Phantom. In December, the official further disclosed that its partner network has expanded to include several financial institutions and large enterprises, including Visa, Mastercard, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, UBS, Shopify, and some tech companies.
In the same month, Swedish fintech company Klarna launched its stablecoin KlarnaUSD and chose to go live on Tempo, becoming an early example of the chain in payment scenarios.
The Tempo team currently consists of about 15 people, operating independently but receiving support from Stripe and Paradigm in terms of resources and ecosystem. The project leader is Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner of Paradigm, who is also a board member of Stripe. Public information shows that Matt Huang will serve as the first CEO of Tempo while continuing to hold a management role at Paradigm.
The core engineering team members mainly come from the Ethereum scaling and infrastructure field. Among them, Liam Horne, who previously served as co-founder and CEO of Optimism, is involved in the core construction of Tempo; Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos is responsible for engineering direction, and his past experience in Reth, Foundry, and Ethereum clients and development tools provides important support for Tempo's underlying implementation. Market and partnership aspects are driven by Simon Taylor, who has long been engaged in fintech consulting and entrepreneurship.
Ordinary users can experience the Tempo testnet through the following steps:
· First, add the Tempo testnet to compatible wallets like MetaMask, with network information available in its official documentation.
· Second, users can claim free test stablecoins from the testnet faucet to pay for subsequent transaction fees.
· After obtaining test coins, users can perform a series of core interactions, such as sending an on-chain transaction on a specific website, deploying a simple smart contract using tools like Remix, or minting NFTs on the testnet. Additionally, users can register testnet domain names or participate in tasks released by third-party platforms to deepen interactions.
At the same time, users can also set up network nodes themselves to participate in the network through official documentation tutorials.
Tempo has not yet launched its mainnet, with the official expected launch time set for 2026. The current testnet supports basic EVM functions and has launched payment channels, stablecoin gas mechanisms, and decentralized trading components.
At the application level, the first NFT project has appeared on the Tempo testnet. The Momo series released by artist Lola is regarded as the first NFT collection on Tempo, characterized by a retro animation style, with plans to gradually roll out in 2026.
Although Tempo has garnered significant attention from traditional finance and crypto capital, its development path is not without controversy. Christian Catalini, who participated in the design of Meta's stablecoin project Libra, has publicly expressed skepticism about enterprise-led blockchain models. He believes that the core issue faced by projects like Tempo is not technical but lies in the incentive and competitive structure; once a de facto monopoly is formed, the open and permissionless characteristics of the network may be weakened.
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