Revolutionizing Payments: An Inside Look at Tempo’s New Blockchain

I'm Lawrence Wintermeyer, and welcome to FinTech TV at Abu Dhabi Finance Week.

I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by my community partner, Simon Taylor, who is the head of market development at Tempo.

How are you doing, pal?

I'm really well.

Always a pleasure to see you, Lawrence.

How are you doing?

I'm, I'm doing all the better for seeing you here at ADFW.

I mean, you and I work so, uh, so closely on so many things, but I never get to see you, so this is, this is fantastic.

Listen, Tempo's new, tell our audience what Tempo is all about.

Of course, yeah, Tempo is a new layer one blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm.

Dedicated to payments, so there are a lot of good blockchains out there, but they don't work very well for payments.

So, starting with Stripe's experience and some of the challenges on making sure that we had stable, reliable payments infrastructure that would be faster and cheaper, we wanted to build Tempo to show what a payments blockchain can and should look like, and as you know, Lawrence.

Payments are the core premises of the finance.

Everything suffers in cash, so we're building that out.

And hot off the presses, we just launched into Testnet yesterday, so we are, we're available now at tempo.xyz.

Well, you know, congratulations on the TestNet launch, and uh I love the idea of a specialty payments network as an L1.

And you know, you're a payment specialist, but walk us through this.

I think the biggest criticism, particularly of the larger payment firms, was either the capacity, the volume, or the unit cost of payments, and particularly retail payments.

So what what's your MO on that firm?

What are you guys doing?

So I Actually, um, the biggest issue was reliability.

So, a lot of existing blockchains, uh, if they have network congestion, there's a big meme coin launch, or there's a lot of network activity, the fees spike, the reliability goes down, and maybe you don't make payroll on a Monday.

That's not acceptable for payments.

It might be acceptable for other things, but not for payments, so that was really, really important.

The other thing that you had to do is make sure that you didn't have a volatile token or the fee structure.

So we made sure that uh gas is paid in any stablecoin, and it's stablecoin economicically.

So what that means is we can set a fee structure that is consistent and consistently low.

So there are other chains where fees are pretty low, but it's that consistency that's the really key thing.

Then lastly, we built a bunch of additional capabilities.

Into transactions like memo fields, so that existing payments companies can deal with all of the reconciliation and the compliance things they have to do in their systems as they come on chain.

They're not trying to figure that out.

They don't exist in two universes.

Tempo just looks like a payment system as far as they're concerned.

It happens to be a payment system that's lower cost, instant, 24/7, and global, and we're backed by some amazing design partners.

We have folks like Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered and UBS, but we also have OpenAI and Anthropic and DoorDash and Ram and Brex, and many, many others actually giving us hands-on experience using the testnet today to tell us how can we make this product even better, faster and cheaper.

Wow, what, what a pantheon of institutions there, fantastic.

So give us a quick walkthrough what does 2026 and the future look like, Well, you know, what are the the the first taxes off the rank post, you know, test net and and in, in the program.

So the, the big one is to focus on the existing stablecoin use cases for enterprises.

So this will be payouts.

I want to pay a contractor in an emerging market, whether they're in the gig economy or it's payroll, and collections.

I'm SpaceX and I need to collect dollars from anywhere.

Around the world.

Those are the two core use cases.

And then the third one, a lot with payments companies, is actually 24/7 treasury management, that instant liquidity and being able to repatriate dollars or move them around wherever you've got too many dollars stuck in one region, and you're waiting for the correspondent banking windows to open, stablecoins allow you to float that back and forth.

That's the killer use case right there, isn't it?

That's the.

Use case, and we'll see payments companies, some are already live with that.

We'll see a lot more payments companies lean into that, and we think Tempo is the best place to do it.

So we'll be aiming for Minnet in the first half of next year, Temple by name and Tempo by nature.

We're going to move pretty quickly.

Well, Simon Taylor, what an absolute pleasure to catch up with you.

We should do this a bit more often.

Yeah, you're right, we should.

Good to see you.

Thanks for joining us today.

Thank you.