Stripe and Paradigm’s Tempo Blockchain Goes Public, Adds UBS and Kalshi - The Quiet Institutional On-Ramp

Forget the retail hype—the real crypto infrastructure is being built in plain sight, and it just opened for business.

### The Backbone Goes Live

Tempo, the blockchain brainchild of payments giant Stripe and crypto VC powerhouse Paradigm, has officially shed its 'testnet' label. Its public launch isn't aimed at your average DeFi degen. The target? The multi-trillion-dollar world of institutional settlement, where moving money still feels like sending a fax.

### The New Entrants Tell the Story

The first wave of named partners reveals the playbook. Swiss banking titan UBS and prediction market platform Kalshi aren't here to ape into memecoins. They're stress-testing a rail designed for high-volume, compliance-friendly transactions—the kind that makes traditional finance's spine ache. It's a silent bet that the future of asset movement won't run on legacy plumbing.

### Why This Isn't Just Another Chain

This isn't about competing for NFT mints. Tempo's architecture reportedly prioritizes finality and scalability for value transfer over smart contract complexity. Think of it as a dedicated highway for institutional capital, bypassing the congested, speculative backroads of public chains. One cynical finance veteran might call it "the first blockchain built to handle the paperwork."

The quiet launch of Tempo signals a pivotal shift: the tools for mainstream financial adoption are no longer theoretical. They're operational, and they're being handed directly to the incumbents. The race to rebuild finance's foundation just entered a new, decidedly professional, phase.

Fixed fees and technical design

A key technical vision of the network is to overcome one of the greatest weaknesses of many large public blockchain networks: unstable, often-increasing transaction fees. It does this through the utilization of an isolated payment channel to keep the settlement of payments separate from general network components.

This, in turn, enables Tempo to retain a fixed and predictable fee structure, with every standard payment transaction costing a reported 0.1 cents.

Expansion of institutional partnership

The continued expansion of the project’s partner ecosystem demonstrates growing institutional interest in optimized blockchain solutions. UBS and Kalshi join the current existing list of partners, including Deutsche Bank, Nubank, Visa, and AI development companies OpenAI and Anthropic.

The Tempo project is led by Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm. The network’s value to developers was captured best when the project was announced to “bridge the experience gap for developers considering practical use cases for stablecoins.”

In October, Tempo successfully secured $500 million in funding. This investment valued the company at approximately $5 billion. It was led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks, with participation from firms like Sequoia and Ribbit Capital.

Tempo’s core strategy

Announced in September 2025, Tempo is built as a payment-focused LAYER 1 blockchain. It serves as an independent primary network rather than being constructed as a scaling solution on top of another existing chain. 

It was first conceptualized to build a network intended for high-volume, real-world financial services and to diverge from crypto infrastructure that traditionally has served trading and speculation more than anything else.

Tempo shows Stripe’s shift to more blockchain integration, which began in February 2025 with the purchase of Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure, and earlier agreements with businesses like Visa that allowed stablecoins to be spent anywhere in various jurisdictions. 

As part of this approach, Tempo aims to offer the high-throughput, low-latency performance needed for large-scale use cases, such as cross-border remittances, payroll processing, and global payouts.

Also Read: Stripe Launches USD Stablecoin Payments on Ethereum, Base, & Polygon