Stripe entered the blockchain market last year with Tempo, a stablecoin-focused digital ledger it incubated – one of several ways the payment technology giant is trying to advance the cryptocurrencies.

Stripe further developed the blockchain business with Paradigm, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund. Then, the companies introduced Tempo in September 2025 with their initial partners artificial intelligence company Anthropic; food delivery provider DoorDash; and card network Visa. Today, companies use Tempo for remittances, cross-border payouts, and agentic commerce.

The startup has raised $500 million, giving it a $5 billion valuation, Fortune reported in October 2025. Tempo is led by Matt Huang, Paradigm’s co-founder and managing partner. Huang is also a director at Stripe and Kalshi, the online prediction exchange.

Dan Romero, a former Coinbase executive, is Tempo’s chief business officer. In a Nov. 6 interview, he discussed the blockchain’s origin, customers and the growing role of agentic payments.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.  

PAYMENTS DIVE: Stablecoins seem to have found a home in cross-border payments since the Genius Act. Are they being used anywhere else notably?

DAN ROMERO: There is a lot of trading that still happens with stablecoins. That was kind of the original use case. You pair a stablecoin with a crypto asset, and it's kind of a way to trade it. I think what has emerged over the last couple of years are what I would call real-world flows, flows that touch things that are not just crypto, (they’re) very much cross-border use cases. Remittance companies are very much leaning into stablecoins, traditional ones like Western Union and MoneyGram. Anyone who is moving money cross-border is taking a hard look at stablecoins because of that better, faster, cheaper nature, and that’s already a pretty competitive business from a kind of margin standpoint and cost. So, anytime you can actually improve efficiencies there – very compelling. A second component of cross-border, which is starting to pick up, is international payroll. 

And third … is just anyone who is moving a lot of money – they move it into their marketplace and then out of their marketplace to other bank accounts. They’re saying, “Why not offer a kind of embedded stablecoin wallet with the payout?” You can actually link a debit card, so it's really easy now to issue a virtual card off of any type of financial account that’s using stablecoins, and then it just appears in your Apple Pay, like any other card.

Is anyone doing this?

DoorDash is early to this, but DoorDash is an interesting marketplace because they have both the delivery drivers ... and the restaurants. You can imagine a world where DoorDash, not only in a country like the U.S., but they have operations all over the world. Stablecoins can move 24/7. They can move on the weekends. So you could imagine a future world where, when you complete a delivery working for DoorDash, you could get instantly paid out with a stablecoin into a wallet, where you may have a linked debit card, which means you can immediately go spend that, or the ability to have it go into an earned (deposit) program. Think of it as this modular financial infrastructure that’s quite flexible, and now in a post-Genius (Act) world, it’s regulated, and that's a good thing for enterprises.

It almost sounds like you're talking about a future where DoorDash, Amazon and the like become banks.

I would tweak that slightly. When you pay out a stablecoin to an embedded wallet, that's a self-custodial experience, and I think a lot of the infrastructure to make that seamless and feel just like a normal app – compared to crypto experiences from 10 years ago – there's been a lot of technology and infrastructure progression. Any marketplace you're paying someone out in stablecoin, the wallet that's holding the stablecoin, the user is fully in control. 

How did Tempo get started?

When I was at Coinbase, (the) 2014 era, Stripe was early to experimenting with bitcoin payments. In the early days, we thought bitcoin was going to be the new way to spend money online. In retrospect, (it’s) kind of obvious it was too volatile, too slow, too confusing for consumers. But Stripe was early, and experimented. It didn't work. They just shut it down. Sometimes experiment stuff doesn't work. The last couple years, Stripe has seen some of these early use cases that were more real world with stablecoins, and I think they were early to making a bet on stablecoins. They acquired Bridge actually before the Genius Act (Bridge sale was in October 2024). I don't think most people appreciate that. So, they were kind of skating to where the puck was going. But after acquiring Bridge and then Privy, which powers the wallets, I think Stripe realized that none of the blockchains that were out there were particularly well suited for at-scale payments.

Was that true or was that Stripe’s blockchain premise at the time?

I’d definitely say it was true. You couldn't get a normal payment, because everyone was trading. Think of it as (putting) Visa and the New York Stock Exchange together on the same database – you couldn’t get a payment through for six hours. It's just untenable for any company that’s trying to build on this stuff. … There's a lot of profit opportunity there. So, the willingness to pay on any given trade transaction is much higher than a payments transaction. Payments are low margin. Anytime there's actually a lot of activity happening on blockchain, payments get crowded out. Just a core premise: If you're in the business of doing both trading and payments, you are actually in the business of trading. Tempo reverses that structural level for the chain. We give 90% of the block space … to payments, the simple A-to-B transactions, and then the trades get put in second priority. That's actually worse for our business in terms of we make less money per transaction.

What’s the Tempo customer mix today?

Any company that would already do payments with Stripe. DoorDash is a good example. A lot of them, post-Genius, are now interested in stablecoins for some of the reasons we mentioned. Those companies kind of are our bread and butter in the sense that we're focused on payments. 

We have another category, which I would call … stablecoin savvy or stablecoin native. These are companies that already were using stablecoins, potentially pre-Genius, because they were startups. They were a little bit more comfortable with it, and I think that they've been uniquely enabled in growing their businesses by that. The third one, which is a bit more nascent, is agentic payments and AI and how do you actually play in that space? Our point of view is we're really, really early to agentic payments, and even three months ago, I'd have told you there’s basically none happening. I think it's materially changed in the last two months with Instinct and (Meta’s) Muse, and now I think the frontier labs are all basically going to have their own version of a personal agent assistant.

For the agent payments you mentioned, what are they being made with?

I would anticipate others are going to have more agentic payments in the next six to 12 months. I don't think it’s going to be a sleepy space. I would say most of those transactions today are happening over cards. I think a lot of them are happening over (digital wallet) Stripe Link, because they were early. But I think Shopify has their own product. You can imagine anyone who has a wallet and a balance is going to say, “Hey, we want to make it agent friendly” – not maybe everyone. Some of the big banks are like, “Whoa, I don't want an agent touching anything.” I think you're naturally going to find startups are going to probably cater more to consumer preferences, and then bigger companies may be a little more wary.