Stripe-backed Tempo blockchain raises $500M Series A with a $5B valuation to spur payments-oriented Layer 1 innovation with major partners.
The payment-optimized blockchain developed by Stripe and Paradigm, Tempo, recently raised 500 million in a Series A round.
Thrive Capital and Greenoaks were the lead investors, and they were joined by Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, and SV Angel. Although Stripe and Paradigm were the leaders of the project, they failed to invest extra funds in this round.
The transaction would value Tempo at around 5 billion dollars by making it one of the richest new players in blockchain stablecoin infrastructure.
A Payments-Focused Blockchain Built for Real-World Finance
Tempo is an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 blockchain, which is optimized to support high-throughput payments and settlement functionality.
The project is aimed at harmonizing with legacy fintech payment rails, as opposed to decentralized finance protocols.
However, after the project was announced in September 2025, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said that Tempo was an L1 payments-focused project that was optimized to real-world financial services workflows.
Major Partnerships Signal Strong Market Confidence
Tempo has recently attracted major corporate partners such as OpenAI, Shopify, Visa, Anthropic, and Deutsche Bank, an indication of its ambitious plan to transform the payment infrastructure.
The move is spearheaded, in a tactical decision, by the co-founder of Paradigm, Matt Huang, who is also on the board of Stripe.
The network is also growing its engineering staff and, most recently, Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist has joined the Tempo project as a senior engineer and brought up Tempo’s dedication to permissionless principles based on Ethereum.
Stripe’s Deepening Crypto Ambitions
The most recent round of funding further confirms the investment of Stripe in cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation.
Within the last year, Stripe has acquired strategically, including Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company that it recently bought at 1.1 billion and Privy, a crypto-wallet company.
In addition, Stripe has incorporated the Base Layer 2 network by Coinbase as a part of its crypto payments stack, which highlights its increasing presence in digital payments.
Tempo is set to fill the transition between old payment technology and new blockchain technology.
The result of this new capital injection is a wave of energy into the roadmap of the project to develop and drive the digital movement of money that is optimized to meet compliance and scale, and which would be attractive to enterprises and financial institutions.