Stripe is a decacorn, valued at $91.5 billion and facilitating $1.4T annually in payments for various businesses.
This payment volume was reported as a 38% increase, year-to-year in 2024, an equivalent to around 1.3% of global GDP.
Stripe powers half of the Fortune 100, 80% of the Forbes Cloud 100, and 78% of the Forbes AI 50 according to its annual letter published on February 27, 2025.
The growth of payments on-chain is a direct threat to traditional payments businesses like Stripe. Knowing this, the payment giant has been in the news for making strategic moves to better position for the inevitable transition in the payments layer for global trade.
One of such moves was acquiring Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure for $1.1b. Additionally, in June, Privy, a wallet infrastructure powering 75 million accounts, announced being acquired by Stripe for an undisclosed amount. In a more recent report, Stripe is allegedly working on a blockchain for payments called “Tempo.”
Revealed in a job listing on the Blockchain Association website according to a report citing Fortune, Stripe's blockchain for payments is reportedly designed to be Ethereum-compatible and backed by crypto venture capital firm, Paradigm.
Payments giant Stripe is developing “Tempo,” a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain focused on payments, in partnership with crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, according to a job posting discovered on the Blockchain Association website.
As per Fortune report, the stealth project represents Stripe’s most ambitious crypto initiative yet, building on its recent $1.1 billion acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge and purchase of crypto wallet developer Privy.
The job advertisement, dated August 3 and subsequently removed after Fortune’s inquiry, described Tempo as Ethereum-compatible with a five-person team targeting Fortune 500 companies.
Paradigm’s Matt Huang, who sits on Stripe’s board, is partnering on the blockchain development as the company builds a comprehensive crypto infrastructure spanning wallets, stablecoins, and now blockchain processing. – Cryptonews.com report
Why build a blockchain for payments?
Payments are central to everything. There's essentially nothing without payment platforms or infrastructures as those are critical middleware in trade, the heart of global economies.
As aforementioned, Stripe processes trillions of dollars in payments annually and they already power a significant percentage of Fortune 100 companies. As the report highlighted, this move to build a payments blockchain aims to serve Fortune 500 companies.
That said, in the broader spectrum, the growth of on-chain payments and the public successes of leading companies, especially in stablecoin payments, makes for a good motivation for companies like Stripe to get involved.
Despite being a relatively new and small industry, stablecoins volumes, on a monthly basis are already 2.36× larger than Stripe's annual volumes. According to data from RWA.xyz, monthly stablecoins transaction volume is currently at $3.30 trillion across 38.70 million monthly active addresses.
Evidently, there's a huge market appeal for Stripe to get positioned before mass consumer and business adoption of on-chain payments.