Stripe Builds Its Own Blockchain for Cross-Border Payments

FinTech Stripe has spent much of its operational history making it easier for merchants to plug into the financial system. Now, it is trying to redesign the system itself.

According to the company’s 2025 annual letter, which was published Tuesday (Feb. 24) and devoted a good chunk to blockchain and stablecoins, Stripe sees on-chain transaction settlement as a crucial infrastructure layer for the new commerce economy.

But Stripe isn’t rushing bullishly into the cryptocurrency space. The FinTech’s executives used the annual letter to argue that most blockchain networks were optimized for trading and decentralized finance, not for enterprise-grade transaction reliability. Bitcoin, for example, processes fewer than 10 transactions per second, and congestion events on major chains have caused payment delays exceeding 12 hours and fee spikes of 35x, conditions that are pretty much unacceptable for commercial settlement.

Stripe’s answer to that mismatch is its own Tempo solution, a blockchain that the letter said is “purpose-built for payments” and optimized for stablecoins that offers dedicated payment lanes, sub-second finality, and interoperability with compliance and accounting systems.

“It may be a crypto winter, but it’s a stablecoin summer,” wrote Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison in the letter.

Early Tempo participants on the blockchain’s testnet include Visa, Nubank and Shopify, which are already testing use cases such as global payouts, embedded finance and remittances, while Klarna launched a bank-issued stablecoin on Tempo to enable cheaper cross-border settlement.

Tempo’s public mainnet launch is set for later this year.

Read also: Stripe and PayPal Combination Would Reorder the Payments Landscape

Global-by-Default Commerce Needs Global-by-Default Money

Stripe’s original breakthrough was abstraction. Its APIs turned payments from a compliance-heavy banking integration into a few lines of code, catalyzing a generation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, marketplaces and subscription businesses.

That model scaled enormously. Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in payment volume last year, equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP, while the company now serves more than 5 million businesses directly or indirectly, according to a Tuesday update.

But Stripe’s co-founders said the internet economy has outgrown API-driven financial plumbing designed for a slower, geographically bounded era. Per the annual letter, today’s startups launch internationally from day one rather than expanding country by country. A new generation of companies now treats “the internet itself” as their domestic market.

Financial infrastructure, however, has lagged behind that reality, while stablecoins are emerging as a key workaround. The letter said stablecoin payment volume doubled to roughly $400 billion in 2025, with an estimated 60% tied to B2B payments rather than speculative trading.

Data in the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Ready for Change: Why Nearly Half of SMBs Want to Ditch Cash and Checks,” a Mastercard collaboration, found that the bulk of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are ready to move beyond legacy payment methods.

See also: Banks and Stablecoin Wallets Battle for Digital Cash’s Front Door

The Agent Economy Is Stablecoins’ Real Catalyst

The deeper rationale for Tempo lies not in crypto adoption but in artificial intelligence. Stripe is betting that software agents will increasingly transact directly with one another, compressing economic activity into automated microtransactions executed at machine speed. The company expects transaction demand to grow so dramatically that blockchains may need to support “more than 1 million or even 1 billion transactions per second,” per the letter.

If agents become economic actors, payments infrastructure must evolve from human-paced authorization flows to programmable settlement layers embedded directly into software logic, a reality that sounds a lot like the one stablecoins and blockchains can underpin.

Stripe is already moving down-stack. Its acquisitions of wallet infrastructure provider Privy and stablecoin orchestration platform Bridge point to a strategy of integrating identity, custody and liquidity into a unified and interoperable programmable environment.

Payment infrastructure becomes dominant not by owning the customer relationship but by becoming the connective tissue everyone relies on. Just as cloud providers power competing software ecosystems, Stripe appears to envision Tempo as a neutral coordination layer, spanning banks, FinTechs, AI systems and global enterprises.

If successful, it could make routing around Stripe increasingly impractical. Not because of exclusivity, but because of integration density.

Still, Stripe’s current revenue model of transaction fees, financial tooling and value-added services maps cleanly onto card networks and bank-based flows. A blockchain-native settlement layer introduces new variables, such as validation economics, liquidity provisioning, programmable financial services and enterprise integrations.