Stripe, the fintech titan, is accelerating its march into stablecoins and next-generation payments. A since-deleted job posting has exposed a quiet joint venture with crypto-focused VC firm Paradigm: the two are co-building Tempo, a high-performance, payments-centric Layer-1 blockchain. Tempo is the keystone in Stripe’s expanding stable-coin strategy and signals an ambition to redraw the architecture of global money itself.

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Tempo—A Layer-1 Purpose-Built for Payments

Archives of a product-marketing job ad (now removed from both Fortune and the Blockchain Association website) describe Tempo as “a high-performance, payments-only Layer-1 blockchain.” The five-person team is hiring its first marketer, demanding Fortune-500-grade experience and fluency in either fintech or crypto. Four sources told Fortune that Tempo is a Layer-1 that speaks Ethereum-compatible languages—granting independence while tapping the vast talent pool of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang, already a Stripe board member, was an early backer of Privy, the embedded-wallet startup Stripe acquired in 2025. Paradigm led Privy’s $18 million Series A in November 2023 and joined its board again in March 2025 for a $15 million extension round. Those overlapping relationships laid the groundwork for Paradigm and Stripe to co-develop Tempo. In February, Huang revealed that Paradigm was advising “some of the largest companies in the world” on stable-coin adoption—whether for faster global expansion or simpler treasury management.

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Phase 1—Buying the Rails: The $1.1 B Bridge Acquisition

Stripe’s stable-coin master plan began with infrastructure. In October 2024 it paid a record $1.1 billion for Bridge, a stable-coin on-/off-ramp that lets any business plug fiat and stable-coin flows into a single API.

Bridge already counts SpaceX among its marquee clients: Starlink uses it to repatriate revenues from Argentina, Nigeria and beyond. Mexican neobank DollarApp lets gig workers receive dollar payroll from platforms like Deel, while fintech Artim pays Latin American contractors in stable coins through Bridge. At Stripe Sessions 2025, co-founder John Collison noted that Bridge’s first two years show “an even steeper exponential curve” than Stripe’s own early growth—evidence, he says, of stable coins’ breakout moment.

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Phase 2—Cards & Accounts: Plugging Stable Coins into Everyday Life

On 30 April, Bridge teamed up with Visa to launch a programmable stable-coin card. One API call lets developers issue Visa cards backed by USDC or USDB in multiple countries. Cardholders spend stable coins wherever Visa is accepted; merchants still settle in local currency.

Barely a week later, on 8 May, Stripe unveiled its Stable-coin Financial Account. Businesses can now hold balances in USDC/USDB, push or pull funds via ACH, SEPA or wire, and sweep money to external bank accounts or self-hosted wallets—all powered by Bridge under the hood.

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Phase 3—Owning the Wallet: Acquiring Privy

In June 2025 Stripe acquired Privy, an embedded-wallet provider that lets apps spin up self-custodial wallets for users without leaving the product flow. Privy combines trusted execution environments (TEEs) with distributed key-sharding to deliver seamless, secure and scalable wallets.

Privy already serves 75 million accounts across 180 countries, processes 85 million transactions a month, and fields 500 million RPC calls. Its customer roster spans Hyperliquid, Farcaster, Jupiter, Zora, pump.fun and Blackbird.

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Phase 4—Closing the Loop: Building Tempo

Tempo is the final puzzle piece. By owning the Layer-1 that settles stable-coin transactions, Stripe gains end-to-end control of the value chain: Bridge handles issuance and enterprise rails, Privy supplies the consumer wallet, Visa cards and bank rails move money in and out, and Tempo processes every underlying transfer. The goal is nothing less than a Stripe-owned, full-stack stable-coin payment flow.

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Stripe’s True Endgame—Becoming the Bridge Between Web2 and Web3

Stripe’s existing network gives the new stack instant distribution. In their February 2025 annual letter, CEO Patrick Collison and John Collison revealed that 2024 volume on Stripe hit $1.4 trillion—up 38 % and equal to 1.3 % of global GDP. Half of the Fortune 100, 80 % of the Forbes Cloud 100 and 78 % of the Forbes AI 50 already run on Stripe; one in six new Delaware incorporations uses Stripe Atlas. The company is already “the default platform for building stable-coin apps,” they claim, and is advising global giants on stable-coin strategy.

If the vision succeeds, Stripe will stand at the crossroads of Web2 and Web3 finance, further entrenching its trillion-dollar empire. But the stakes are larger than efficiency. In the same letter, Stripe argues that stable coins could become “the next evolution of the Eurodollar”—a low-friction, global form of dollar liquidity that simultaneously broadens the greenback’s reach and turns stable-coin issuers into major buyers of U.S. Treasuries. The empire Stripe is building may end up reinforcing not just its own dominance, but the dollar’s.

Stripe, the fintech titan, is accelerating its march into stablecoins and next-generation payments. A since-deleted job posting has exposed a quiet joint venture with crypto-focused VC firm Paradigm: the two are co-building Tempo, a high-performance, payments-centric Layer-1 blockchain. Tempo is the keystone in Stripe’s expanding stable-coin strategy and signals an ambition to redraw the architecture of global money itself.

---

Tempo—A Layer-1 Purpose-Built for Payments

Archives of a product-marketing job ad (now removed from both Fortune and the Blockchain Association website) describe Tempo as “a high-performance, payments-only Layer-1 blockchain.” The five-person team is hiring its first marketer, demanding Fortune-500-grade experience and fluency in either fintech or crypto. Four sources told Fortune that Tempo is a Layer-1 that speaks Ethereum-compatible languages—granting independence while tapping the vast talent pool of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang, already a Stripe board member, was an early backer of Privy, the embedded-wallet startup Stripe acquired in 2025. Paradigm led Privy’s $18 million Series A in November 2023 and joined its board again in March 2025 for a $15 million extension round. Those overlapping relationships laid the groundwork for Paradigm and Stripe to co-develop Tempo. In February, Huang revealed that Paradigm was advising “some of the largest companies in the world” on stable-coin adoption—whether for faster global expansion or simpler treasury management.

---

Phase 1—Buying the Rails: The $1.1 B Bridge Acquisition

Stripe’s stable-coin master plan began with infrastructure. In October 2024 it paid a record $1.1 billion for Bridge, a stable-coin on-/off-ramp that lets any business plug fiat and stable-coin flows into a single API.

Bridge already counts SpaceX among its marquee clients: Starlink uses it to repatriate revenues from Argentina, Nigeria and beyond. Mexican neobank DollarApp lets gig workers receive dollar payroll from platforms like Deel, while fintech Artim pays Latin American contractors in stable coins through Bridge. At Stripe Sessions 2025, co-founder John Collison noted that Bridge’s first two years show “an even steeper exponential curve” than Stripe’s own early growth—evidence, he says, of stable coins’ breakout moment.

---

Phase 2—Cards & Accounts: Plugging Stable Coins into Everyday Life

On 30 April, Bridge teamed up with Visa to launch a programmable stable-coin card. One API call lets developers issue Visa cards backed by USDC or USDB in multiple countries. Cardholders spend stable coins wherever Visa is accepted; merchants still settle in local currency.

Barely a week later, on 8 May, Stripe unveiled its Stable-coin Financial Account. Businesses can now hold balances in USDC/USDB, push or pull funds via ACH, SEPA or wire, and sweep money to external bank accounts or self-hosted wallets—all powered by Bridge under the hood.

---

Phase 3—Owning the Wallet: Acquiring Privy

In June 2025 Stripe acquired Privy, an embedded-wallet provider that lets apps spin up self-custodial wallets for users without leaving the product flow. Privy combines trusted execution environments (TEEs) with distributed key-sharding to deliver seamless, secure and scalable wallets.

Privy already serves 75 million accounts across 180 countries, processes 85 million transactions a month, and fields 500 million RPC calls. Its customer roster spans Hyperliquid, Farcaster, Jupiter, Zora, pump.fun and Blackbird.

---

Phase 4—Closing the Loop: Building Tempo

Tempo is the final puzzle piece. By owning the Layer-1 that settles stable-coin transactions, Stripe gains end-to-end control of the value chain: Bridge handles issuance and enterprise rails, Privy supplies the consumer wallet, Visa cards and bank rails move money in and out, and Tempo processes every underlying transfer. The goal is nothing less than a Stripe-owned, full-stack stable-coin payment flow.

---

Stripe’s True Endgame—Becoming the Bridge Between Web2 and Web3

Stripe’s existing network gives the new stack instant distribution. In their February 2025 annual letter, CEO Patrick Collison and John Collison revealed that 2024 volume on Stripe hit $1.4 trillion—up 38 % and equal to 1.3 % of global GDP. Half of the Fortune 100, 80 % of the Forbes Cloud 100 and 78 % of the Forbes AI 50 already run on Stripe; one in six new Delaware incorporations uses Stripe Atlas. The company is already “the default platform for building stable-coin apps,” they claim, and is advising global giants on stable-coin strategy.

If the vision succeeds, Stripe will stand at the crossroads of Web2 and Web3 finance, further entrenching its trillion-dollar empire. But the stakes are larger than efficiency. In the same letter, Stripe argues that stable coins could become “the next evolution of the Eurodollar”—a low-friction, global form of dollar liquidity that simultaneously broadens the greenback’s reach and turns stable-coin issuers into major buyers of U.S. Treasuries. The empire Stripe is building may end up reinforcing not just its own dominance, but the dollar’s.