Stripe CEO explains why Stablecoins won global businesses

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said Stablecoins gets adoption because they offer businesses faster, cheaper and more reliable payments than traditional systems.
His comments come to a Hacker news thread On September 5, 2025, one day after stripe and paradigm launched The tempo, a blockchain designed specifically for stablecoin payments.
In his first comment on the tempo announcement thread, Collison wrote that Stripe had “failed in the crypto payment utility for most of the past decades.” He said the company’s view moved as more businesses began using stablecoins for routine financial activity.
Collison pointed out Bridgethe stablecoin infrastructure provider stripe obtained In October 2024. He said Spacex uses it to manage currency flows in hard-to-reach markets, the Latin American Fintech Doctaral depends on it for banking services, and an Argentinian bike import uses a stripe dashboard to pay suppliers.
“These businesses do not use crypto because they are crypto or for imaginary benefits,” Collison wrote. “They are conducting real financial activity in the world, and they have found that crypto (by stablecoins) is easier, faster, better than status quo. “
When asked if people would later “pay with Tempo,” Collison said the blockchain was intended to work behind the scenes. He compared it to financial messaging systems such as Swift or ACH, noting that consumers may not be in contact with the tempo directly but will benefit from its efficiency. He called “Decentralized, Internet-Scale Swift” an imperfect but useful similarity.
In answer to another question (About why businesses find crypto payments that are appealing)Collison described five factors that companies prefer stablecoins: close-instant settlement that reduces trapped liquidity, lower cost than card payments, more reliability in cross-border transfers, fewer money conversions and direct US-chain access to US dollars.
He also denied the idea that adoption was a major regulation of arbitrage. Collison said the stablecoins were clearly regulated in the United States under the Genius Act and Europe under MICA, and their appeal lies in resolving the frictions of the high-volume currency movement.
In Thursday’s announcement, Tempo was subscribed as a “payment-first” blockchain built from the ground up for Stablecoins, which combines the global stripe payment experience in the paradigm crypto research. Companies said they launched the network to provide infrastructure that consistent with real-world payment requirements as Stablecoins moved to basic use.
Tempo design emphasizes unpredictable low fees, optional privacy and the ability to pay both gas transactions and costs to any stablecoin. It includes a dedicated payment line with features such as memos and access lists, and compatible with EVM, which runs on the RETH client. Stripe and Paradigm say the blockchain is engineered to process more than 100,000 transactions per second with a sub-second end.
The network aims to support global payouts and payrolls, remittances, tokenized deposits that can settle around the clock, emerged financial accounts, microtransaction and what companies call “payment agents.”
Stripe and paradigm also emphasized management. They said the tempo would operate as a neutral platform for Stablecoins, which was secured by an independent and varying validator set, with a roadmap towards completely unauthorized authentication.
The project was launched with a wide roster of design partners, including visa, standard chartered, Deutsche Bank, Nubank, Revolut, Shopify, Openai, Anthropic, Coupang, Doordash, Lead Bank and Mercury.