Why does Stripe want to creatively ruin their reputation by venturing into crypto / blockchain?
I don't see anyone in the real world using blockchains at all.
I get AI as it was a real world paradigm shift, but I have never seen anything in this blockchain / crypto space that has reached 100-500 million users let alone 1 billion users, that isn't based on speculation.
People use it for selling accounts, usernames, cheats and probably much more for it. Many of these also use Stripe (major cheat providers offer payments via Stripe and crypto, so why shouldn't Stripe also try to capture the value of Crypto payments?).
Many companies are using stablecoins for cross border transactions, and for payouts in countries with volatile currencies. There's clear value for these use-cases.
Not to mention lower fees and 24/7 availability.
Stablecoins enable instant, borderless, programmable transactions, but current blockchain infrastructure isn’t designed for them: existing systems are either fully general or trading-focused. Tempo is a blockchain designed and built for real-world payments.
- First line in TFA
How?
> existing systems are either fully general or trading-focused. Tempo is a blockchain designed and built for real-world payments.
What makes existing systems not suitable for instant, borderless transactions? What makes this new chain suitable for instant, borderless transactions?
Any system with an API is programmable.
That says nothing of political idiocy which will surely follow as new levers are tested, but payment processors are in the business of making money, and ostensibly want as many transactions to happen as possible, regardless of origin or the particulars of any sale.
They shouldn't be gatekeeping goods and services for legal transactions, and I'd be willing to bet most of them absolutely don't want to be in that position.
I imagine there's also a chargeback scam reduction and accountability benefit to this, which reduces losses, and ostensibly prices.
There's a surveillance and privacy hit, but it's not like the systems currently being used aren't completely compromised and surveilled already, so maybe this adds some accountability at that level as well.
Does this mean these companies are about to start accepting stablecoins as payment (via Tempo?) some time in the future? Seems out of the ordinary to work with these companies otherwise.
I do think it's possible they put more money/talent onto the problem after it happened though.
* https://www.nist.gov/blockchain
Specifically the yes/no flowchart on whether "you may have a useful blockchain use case" (Figure 6 - DHS Science & Technology Directorate Flowchart):
* https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distribut...
"Are the entities with write access having a difficult time deciding who should be in charge of the data store"
The vast majority of pointless blockchaining come from organisations that have already decided that they are going to be in charge. Which is just great for them, but it doesn't induce others to join them. I wonder how much of promoting blockchains is to project the illusion of relinquishing a degree of control. I guess all the ones doing it just because others were doing it are looking at AI now.
Once it's truly "open", you can't have any sensitive identifiers in there, so you need another protocol/system for correlating opaque identifiers with real-world entities (thus defeating the purpose).
And if financial institutions are involved, they'll want the ability to do what they do now: rewrite history whenever they feel the need (or are compelled by governments). Another strike against using blockchain.
That being said, I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing...especially outside of the US/europe banking I get the impression that banking regulations are arbitrary and political and if all we get from crypto is escape from those regulations it may be worth the extra fraud and so on.
Historically, there have been hundreds of blockchians that were basically slightly modified forks of Ethereum clients, operated by a small group of validators that sacrifice decetralization in order to achieve higher throughput. This seems to be a slightly higher effort verson of that.
Eg if Australian locals suddenly switch transacting cocaine at scale in Tether instead of AUD, the US government can borrow more money by providing that collateral to Tether.
Edit: Izzy Kaminska recently had a, as always, solid and less snarky summary at https://www.financialsense.com/blog/21379/redollarization-an...
Second, Tether is not a regulated stablecoin in United States.
The bonds are sold en masse, and the value of those bonds will be hit, driving up gov borrowing costs (plus they just lost a source of demand), meaning the stablecoin “bank” could be bankrupt, right?
With stable coins you’re really trusting a private company to invest your money in a way that is robust to a drop in confidence. Isn’t this high risk? If a coin gets large enough, is it a threat to government solvency?
But I guess we will find out in a 2027 Bessent presser announcing the Fed stepping in.
More serious answer: the bigger risk is trusting SV types to be content with a couple of percent in spread, and not starting to pull all kind of shenanigans to juice returns to a point where it becomes much harder to bail them out vs just taking back the treasuries.
US government solvency seems, as crazy as it sounds, less of an issue, as evidenced by the brief tantrums with absolutely no real effects beyond a couple of protesting headlines in the recent months. Where else are people around the world going to put their money? But as gifted as the current gov crew is at turning privilege into disaster, we're probably going to find out soon enough if there are any actual limits to that.
> Stablecoins enable instant, borderless, programmable transactions, but current blockchain infrastructure isn’t designed for them: existing systems are either fully general or trading-focused. Tempo is a blockchain designed and built for real-world payments.
What is different in the details, no idea.
Regulations in payments tend to be very technical, and inserting some crypto/distributed plausible deniability in the mix could get them 5 more years of delay (until the next generation of regulations). It will depend on how those regulations take shape in the coming months.
In this day and age, countries need not be beholden to the pile of duct tape that is the credit card system and its innumerate middle-men and inefficiencies.
This is a good thing.
https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/number-of-cryptocurrencies-...
Bitcoin is decentralized because the sun distributes energy somewhat evenly across the globe.
The other 206701340 crypto projects, including this one, are decentralized because ... ?
From the very sparse info on the page, it seems this project does what so many other chains do to make payments faster and cheaper: They log them on a database that is synchronized across only a few computers.
In other words: I can't find any info on that page explaining how they plan to achieve decentralization.
Second, permissionless does not mean decentralized. You can have all validation of a POS chain ending up on a single computer.
There are mild returns to scale in running large-scale mining operations and as a result mining power seems to actually be somewhat centralized under the control of a small number of players: https://digiconomist.net/cryptocurrency-decentralization/
Not to mention that "decentralization" is a technical property and not necessarily desirable in itself. Users might care about fairness, avoiding sanctions, purchasing illegal goods, etc, but these are only weakly connected to technical decentralization.
they will censor you and block you in blockchain level so literally db for few big companies, lol.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/stripe-takes-...
The reason Stellar was appealing was because Stripe invested into it. I wonder if Tempo is using a similar consensus mechanism as Stellar (and/or Ripple)
Importantly, none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit. They're performing real-world financial activity, and they've found that crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante.
This end-run around foreign government monetary control has been touted by Stripe executives as one of the main selling points for USD stablecoins but I don't see how foreign governments don't clamp down on this is in the same ways the clamp down on other uses of USD in the country; most monetary transfers have some physical presence or touchpoints the government can control.
More importantly the US itself is eventually going to come to the conclusion that it does not want people holding US dollars for similar reasons: it also loses control over monetary policy, with excessive inflows un-intuitively leading either to unemployment or excessive debt (c.f. Michael Pettis)
That said, it's possible stablecoin networks succeed for other reasons, particularly having a widely-accepted "API" that is developed at the pace of modern technology companies instead of laggard banks.
That's part of it, but:
1. Progress often depends on evolving obsolete regulation.
Uber works much better than taxis (once upon a time, people could "call a dispatcher" an hour in advance, wait on hold, etc) and yet in the early years they had to work around taxi regs.
2. Blockchains are a fundamentally more robust way to run a ledger.
If any of you have ever written software touching tradfi custody you'll know about "reconciliation"--start of every business day, you get a dump of files in your FTP server in various proprietary formats. You parse the transactions and they don't add up. The Recon team hand-corrects and recategorizes edge cases so that the balance deltas match transaction totals and everything ties out.
This type of absurd duct tape is ubiquitous, and it's a major reason why trad rails have multi-day settlement times and even longer for international. Inflates team size and cost required to run a product. SWIFT is a messaging system -- bankers use it to essentially text each other about wires to figure out issue resolution. Some lower-level trad payments regulations are written assuming that this level of manual oversight is required to prevent ledgering errors and ensure sound accounting.
Stablecoins run on transparent, precise ledgers with machine consensus. This doesn't solve everything, but there are large categories of issues that can occur in trad payments that do not exist onchain.
3. Control is liability.
Some important regulations actually encourage blockchain-based payments. For example, money transmitter law places significant requirements on custodial money transmitters (you take money from Alice, with a promise to give it to Bob) that do not apply to noncustodial channels (you give Alice a mechanism to send directly to Bob).
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQf...
That's more or less exactly what this is. Stripe is launching an EVM L1.
The Ethereum Virtual Machine part gives it a mature tech stack with experienced developers and auditors. Plus, well-tested smart contracts that have already processed billions of dollars on other chains can be deployed on Tempo.
The "Stripe L1" part will ensure that it's fast, simple, near zero cost.
Indeed you can! We even have a name for that! Its called a blockchain.
> This maintains many benefits of the blockchain and lacks many issues (fast, simple, near zero cost, controllable to a given extent -- no takeover possible, ...).
Blockchains can do all of these things.
Perhaps you are thinking of "bitcoin", instead of "blockchains"? Bitcoin, something that was created a whole 17 years ago, indeed has many drawbacks compared to modern blockchains.
But as long as I don't see somewhat more transparent conversations with the people in your orbit like patio11, Matt Levine, Kyla etc, where you address how you'll actually tackle the non-technical challenges ahead, this GTM communication and site looks like every other 2019 JPM, HSBC etc "something blockchain" announcement and hard to get behind as something that might as well be really different this time, and not be killed/sidelined by vested interests. Including your own.
And it sounds like this system targets global payments. Does that imply that some day users would be able to pay using Tempo? Where would we see Tempo?
Very genuinely curious.
Today, if you want to transact between businesses or retail (folks like you and I), you need to find a route between the two entities' banks. This route might take several hops, passing through some central banks, and some of these hops might be instant or might take days to actually settle. On top of that, you need to pay the service that helped you find a route (SWIFT) and potentially the nodes your transaction goes through. Bottomline, it can be slow and a lot of middle men are taxing you.
This is why you see services like (Transfer)Wise, that basically try to bank everywhere, and allow you to send money faster by taking a shorter route (kind of like a wormhole :D). But they have to add liquidity everywhere, which they have to rebalance constantly, and it's centralized (single point of failure). FWIW it's great because for a long time this is the best thing we had.
Now, let's take a look at the other side. Using stablecoin is a matter of just creating a wallet. The openness by default of blockchains make it really easy to integrate with a blockchain as an entity (just use the SDK, it's there by design). Furthermore, it's in many cases instant and cheap (unless you're transacting on a slow blockchain, but then that's your fault).
That being said, the elephant in the room is that one stablecoin (let's say USDC) is now present on many blockchains. So if you have USDC on chain A, and I have USDC on chain B, we're back to our "tradfi" world where we have to find a route between our two chains, which might take us over many bridges, which can be slow and costly. The alternative, like with Wise, is to use centralized players who have liquidity on many different chains and can move things around by just updating their internal (and centralized) database. It's tradfi all over again :D
here is what you're missing, and is very easy to miss:
the third party, unaffiliated, developer experience is better on an EVM than it is is on a traditional centralized database. Than it is on a shared database with a bunch of signers. Than on any "web 2.0" cloud platform. the developers continue to bring their entire audiences with them, even though those audiences are quite small, they've grown in aggregate to be large enough.
in web3, of which EVM platforms dominate and are the most mature, there is a tiny payment for deploying your application once, and then it exists in perpetuity for free at unlimited levels of bandwidth. your users pay to update the state of your application, and in many cases you can earn from them doing that.
there is absolutely nothing in the cloud world that achieves the same thing at the same cost. the payment paradigms are entirely different, you have to pay for hosting, deployment, the thing that handles your deployment, additional workers to unbottleneck your continuous deployment, the bandwidth, bandwidth spikes, and get nickel and dimed on a ton of more things, or paying a premium to a service that handles all that for you.
additionally, the concept of "composability", third party applications are automatically compatible with each other. there are infinite permutations of combinable operations one can do or enable amongst deployed applications. you can compose, or combine, applications in a far less cumbersome or fragile way, than with REST and APIs of different people's apps in the web 2.0 world.
and on top of that, if one of those permutations becomes useful and you make it user friendly to do so, you can collect a toll for others doing that operation. this is just financial services, where "basis points" are collected by intermediaries.
a common application are forms of lending. initiating borrowing, trading the opportunity, and closing the loan within a split second, leveraging 3 - 10 financial services at once, is something that's better faster and cheaper than what has been possible outside of the blockchain space. the ability to do so is gatekept by the other financial industry and payment rails in ways that are no longer necessary to debate. now you can do these things with $3 in capital instead of needing $3 million dollars to pursue getting an API key from some old slow moving organization.
the compelling reason to create a new EVM are to change some basic parameters. block time, the size of contracts (the aforementioned operations) that can be deployed, and which standards are included into that chain. making stablecoins a first class citizen would need a new blockchain.
Checks crypto watch, ah, it's Latin America time again.
Even just paying a foreign contractor is a pain in the ass sometimes so if a bunch of banks and financial service providers around the world manage to make international transfer easier via the coins, that’s great. Not everyone cares about the inconvenience of KYC or reversibility of transactions sent internationally. These usecases feel more like shortcutting the complexity of transactions across state lines rather than the regulations we’ve learned about the hard way in a hundred years. Obstacles rather than safeguards.
I am actually optimistic that, finally, there could be a convincing answer, because stripe does not strike me as the type of company that would do this without a very good reason. (I am slightly less optimistic, because the page itself does not offer an answer to this question, and instead argues for tempo against other blockchains. But only slightly.)
I don't really get the draw either - what is the point of having a distributed blockchain if it is controlled by a single entity?
I will end with this thought: If we can get to a new local equilibrium where global transaction costs are 10x lower and >30% of global GDP can get paid faster / with better price signals / etc., shouldn't we try even if the tech is non-optimal?
Stablecoins are a sort of “glue” between global banking infrastructure that otherwise would be difficult to set up as a provider (due to regulation), slow (due to bank technology for global payments being slow), and opaque (due to the shortcomings of global payments between financial institutions).
I would love for stripe to start paying appropriate VAT on transactions between their merchants and EU citizens, I've been on their ass about it for nearly a year now. I've reported multiple merchants to them which simply refused to provide an VAT invoice for any transactions. Legally, merchants outside EU are required to pay VAT on their B2C transactions if their EU transaction volume goes above a certain limit, and provide VAT invoice for B2B transactions (but with 0% VAT because it is B2B).
But unfortunately Stripe doesn't seem to have the technology to do a SUM(*) in their database, or check if an email address ends in '.de' or '.it' when they take the payment. So they simply do not give a damn if their merchants provide an invoice with the transaction or not.
Oftentimes it was the problem to actually get an invoice document which has company name, company registration number, street address, city, and tax ID. Extremely basic information which is required on all EU invoices. Many times I have submitted invoices from Stripe merchants to my tax accountant and my tax accountant told me that those are not proper invoices and to please reach out to the merchant to get EU-legal invoices.
Stripe has the technological capabilities to implement proper compliance checks, but they choose to let their merchants send you rubbish self-made PDF invoices with a big red "paid" stamp without any information or "official" Stripe invoices with total fantasy names and fantasy company information. You never know if your merchant is sitting in an embargoed country or is just some schmuck from San Francisco trying to hide their ties to a website.
If other HN users from the EU have been fighting Stripe to get EU-compliant VAT invoices for their B2B or B2C purchases, please feel free to reach out. I've been doing a big stink about this and to me it feels like a deliberate pattern of enabling their merchants to ignore EU VAT obligations.
It's really sad that my extremely positive impression of Stripe has been deeply tainted by this kind of experience across various purchases and subscriptions with Stripe merchants. I had to spend so much time pleading with them to provide proper invoices.
You're trying to get Stripe to force merchants to conform to some arbitrary document format for an invoice that isn't even part of Stripe's transaction flow, based on a regex on emails for certain TLDs?? Is Stripe the world's paperwork policeman?
Maybe just don't order from merchants who won't supply you documents in the format you like, instead of trying to get Stripe to act as judge, jury, and executioner in the court of Stripe. Or talk to your government representatives and get them to lift these rules so you can do business like everyone else in the world.
So if Stripe doesn't force their merchants to provide an invoice which has company name, company address (jurisdiction!) and company registration number (for me to check if it actually exists) then the invoice is rubbish and to be used as toilet paper.
Simple principle, but in my interactions with Stripe they fight tooth and nail to implement and/or enforce it. And even if their merchants "enable" Stripe invoices then Stripe doesn't stop them from putting random addresses into the forms.
Of course the shitty-invoice merchants often have domain privacy enabled and self-claim to reside in a country without any imprint laws on their website. You can pay to them with VISA/Mastercard via Stripe but have no idea which country they are in. Stripe knows exactly in which country both seller and buyer are located at the time of transaction, and they do not use that information to apply the proper tax rate to the transactions. Also even if you show them that a merchant has been skirting VAT payments for years I think they do not force the merchant to state proper invoices for all impacted transactions during that timeframe.
In my opinion these are systemic compliance deficiencies at Stripe and the lack of technological remedies for this problem is apparent (like checking email TLDs to see if customer is in EU). It result in a significant tax theft problem negatively affecting EU member states.
I honestly thought this was fake and not from stripe the first time I saw it. (I kinda still do with that domain.)
According to this Krebs article https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/12/why-phishers-love-new-tl... 13% of the xyz domains was related to phishing, not as bad as .top which ahd 30% but still bad.
If Stripe’s closed-loop system scales, banks and card networks could lose significant transaction volume, fees and even merchant relationships. Merchants and customers win with lower transaction fees. This marks a very credible and large-scale effort yet to challenge the Visa and Mastercard duopoly.
Obviously not perfect and other questionable projects have stained blockchains reputation but it is a net win, no?
Tether has now moved to Bukele's paradise El Salvador and its backing is managed by Howard Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald. Previously Tether's funds were managed by Deltec in the Caribbean, a bank with a colorful history.
https://www.ft.com/content/b3c5b67d-1df8-4417-8dd5-2c86d76d6...
Stablecoins require trusting that the coin issuer doesn't print money. This goes against the core premise of blockchain being trustless!
This is just a payment API with extra steps (all of the integrity and identity features use cryptography that works without blockchain, unless your definition of blockchain is broad enough to include git and matrix chats, then the stripe thing is a blockchain too).
Anyone know what this actually means? Both literally (what is Reth?) and what it means qualitatively: are Stripe’s crypto efforts competing with Ethereum or strengthening it?
Reth - ethereum protocol client written in rust. https://github.com/paradigmxyz/reth
So not decentralized at all. The only reason to not open source validators and allow the public to run their own is to make insiders rich. Another crypto grift that will mint a few millionaires before either being forgotten or merely being used as a speculative instrument.
—-
Blockchain's primary usefulness has been to evade regulations, and due to the rapidly changing nature of the technology, representative democracies with legitimate legal institutions have lagged behind when it comes to regulating it.
The country that wins (prevents fraudsters and scammers who exploit crypto) will be a dictatorship solely because a dictatorship is the only form of government fast enough to either rein in lawless cryptofinance, or exploit it maximally.
When enough actual value creating people who bought in to the libertarian crypto fantasy finally realize that they're slaving away to make ends meet in an economy that enshrines meme coin shills and folks who use crypto to evade the law, it will have been too late.
Okay, so one: Obviously pointless from a tech POV. There is nothing that a Stripe controlled blockchain could offer that a database could not.
But then, why? Sadly, as someone who does like the ideals of true cryptocurrency, yet another way to make sure "real" crypto doesn't happen, much like what is happening to BTC.
Here's hoping (yeah, it's a long shot) people see through all of this and maybe, MAYBE, get into the actual ideals of cryptocurrency again.
I’m curious to know more.
Thanks
One way of thinking about a blockchain is to think of it as a shared datastructure to keep databases in sync. Any time you want to distribute your database over more than just a single central place, in a cryptographically secure way, you're probably going to re-invent a blockchain to do it.
Even more specifically, a blockchain is for when you want Byzantine fault tolerance, i.e. you don't trust one or more of the actors involved. This is the main distinguishing feature of blockchains IMO, the reason we have proof of work, proof of stake, etc. It's also the main thing I saw people getting wrong when using blockchains during the earlier waves of cryptocurrency fever; most proposals for blockchains did make sense as distributed public ledgers, but didn't really need the extra computational overhead because only trusted parties were adding blocks to begin with.
There absolutely is. Its called having access to the ecosystem. The money features that exist in the current blockchain landscape are simply a better developer ecosystem, with many more features, than the non existent "Database driven", uhh money tools.
Blockchains are no longer about the singular feature of having a trustless ledger that bitcoin tried to provide. No, instead it is about a whole variety of money related features and developer ecosystems that simply do not exist outside of the crypto space.
Recreating all that exists in the crypto space, but using a database instead, sounds like a lot of wasted work when you can just use the tools that are already available.
Like what? Speculation?
Are you claiming here that things like banks and stock markets don't exist?
Genuinely curious though; what kind of 'money related features', that have no non-crypto counterparts, are you referring to?
> Attributes: High motor
What is meant by that?
[1] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tempo-xyz/aab97703-13e2-42e8-9fb9-9...
There’s a physicality in the definition that doesn’t really describe the best programmers I’ve worked with.
> In sports, "high motor" describes a player who consistently exerts maximum effort and intensity on every play, showing relentless energy, enthusiasm, and a refusal to take plays off, even when tired or the game situation is difficult.
"EVM-compatible, built on Reth" => they're essentially building a private Ethereum fork with a fancy validator selection process.
Couldn't they just get these benefits (predictable fees, fast settlement) by ... running a database between these financial institutions?
If Stripe controls the validator set (even indirectly), then ... just a distributed database with extra steps, no?
Fancy validator selection sounds like the individual financial institutions are still responsible for managing and maintaining their nodes, which gives them a fair (as in balanced not fair as in a lot) amount of liability/responsibility/control.
A distributed database, afaik, while geographically distributed, entails more centralization of power/control.
I actually don't understand how they were allowed to exist, it's impressive really.
Stripe processes a LOT of money. The customers that get that money need to move it around. Often to banks. Stripe makes no money on that.
Over the last few years, stablecoins have become a preferred means to hold and move money (for convenience, etc).
Stablecoin providers make money on their float -- selling stablecoins means you get free deposits, and risk-free rates are presently around 4%. For every $1M in stablecoins your customers hold, you can make $40k/year. Stablecoin providers like Circle pay about half of that back out to partners that sell the tokens.
Stripe is huge, and well-trusted by customers for handling payments. By adoption stablecoin infrastructure to control financial flows into stablecoins, they can amass huge amounts of stablecoin sales.
If even ~3% of their transaction volume gets held in Stablecoins, and they make 1% a year on that, it's about $1B a year in bottom line.
~$10e9 (daily avg vol) * 365 * 3% (converted to stablecoins) * 1% (net income) = ~$1B
I'm not in that space, but how stable is that 4%? What is it correlated to?
I can hardly see any value in "yet another private blockchain" — just use a database, duh.
Ah yes, the good old "permissionless" blockchain, that's 100% centralized for just the first 100 years of operation, give or take [subject to updated timelines after 100 years]
So now it’s official? The other blockchains were designed for gambling?
luma•2h ago
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https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tac-protocol/