A payments-first Layer 1
Tempo is a payments-first, EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. Its mainnet launched on 18 March 2026. Unlike general-purpose chains that later add payments, Tempo is designed from the ground up for one job: moving USD-denominated stablecoins at scale, with predictable cost and instant settlement.
The design goals are concrete. Blocks come roughly every 500ms with deterministic sub-second finality (a confirmed block cannot be re-orged), and base fees for a simple transfer target under $0.001. Together these make Tempo behave less like a speculative trading venue and more like a payment rail.
No native token, stablecoin gas
Tempo has no native gas token and no announced airdrop. Transaction fees are paid in USD-denominated stablecoins issued under the TIP-20 standard. At the virtual-machine level, BALANCE and SELFBALANCE return 0, because there is no native coin to hold.
To make this work across many different stablecoins, a protocol-native Fee AMM converts a payer's chosen fee token into whatever stablecoin the validator prefers to receive. The user picks any qualifying USD-denominated TIP-20; the validator is still paid in their preferred currency. This is what lets gas be denominated in dollars rather than a volatile token.
EVM-compatible, but tuned for payments
Tempo runs standard Ethereum bytecode and tooling — it is built on the Reth execution client and targets the Osaka hard fork for Solidity, Foundry, and Hardhat compatibility. The full opcode set is supported, except that BALANCE, SELFBALANCE, and CALLVALUE return 0 because there is no native value to carry.
On top of the base EVM, Tempo adds payments-specific machinery: the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) for high-frequency machine-to-machine payments, native account abstraction (fee sponsorship, scoped access keys, passkey signatures), and Payment Lanes that reserve blockspace for simple transfers so they are not starved by other contract activity.
Who runs it
Tempo launched with a permissioned validator set — operators are approved rather than open to anyone — with a stated roadmap toward permissionless validation. Announced corporate validators include Stripe, Visa, Zodia Custody, and MoneyGram.
Consensus is Simplex BFT, provided by the Commonware library, which delivers sub-second deterministic finality and favours safety over liveness: the chain will halt rather than finalise conflicting blocks if more than one-third of validators are unavailable.