Stripe’s blockchain project, Tempo, has raised $500 million in a series one round led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital, valuing the payment-focused network at $5 billion, according to Fortune.
Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital and Ron Conway’s SV Angel also joined the round, while Stripe and Paradigm did not contribute additional capital, a person familiar with the matter said. deal said.
The news comes less than two months after Stripe, a global payments and fintech giant, went public plans for the new layer-1 blockchain In partnership with Paradigm, a venture capital firm that invests in Crypto and Web3 startups.
On September 4, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison wrote in X, “As the use of StableCoins (and crypto more broadly) grows across Stripe, Bridge, and Privy, we’ve found that existing blockchains are no longer optimized for them.”
“We think of Tempo as L1 focused on L1, optimized for high-scale, real-world financial applications,” he said.
Although no launch date was given for Tempo, Paradigm’s chief technology officer Georgios Konstantopoulos said on Friday that the core team behind the open-source projects in Ithaca has joined Tempo to help build the blockchain payment infrastructure and scale engineering efforts.
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A competitive StableCoin market
While Stripe has not revealed plans for a native tempo token, blockchain’s focus on payment infrastructure puts it in competition with some stablecoin outsiders embedded in global payment systems.
A competitor would be Circle, which issued USDC (USDC), a stablecoin that is backed 1:1 against the US dollar integrated with MasterCard and Visa. USDC was launched in 2018 and currently have a market cap of $75.6 billion, which only rides on tether’susdt (USDT).
In August, Circle announced that it would be launching a Layer-1 blockchain later this year To offer an “enterprise-gradefoundation” for StableCoin payments, capital market applications, and foreign exchange.
Much of the recent momentum in the stablecoin space follows the Passage of Genius AcT in the US. The law was enacted in July to establish federal rules for StableCoin issuers.
StableCoins Pegged to the euro is also becoming more popular, as the European Union aims to compete US dollar dollar tokens.
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