Tempo Public Testnet Goes Live: Key Features and Updates for Builders and Early Testers

Tempo, a Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for high-volume payments, launched its public testnet on December 9, 2025. Early testers, including payment developers and infrastructure partners, now have access to the chain’s core architecture, allowing them to evaluate how features such as stablecoin-native gas, deterministic finality, and reserved blockspace perform under realistic payment workloads.

The testnet includes core features such as dedicated payment lanes for stable fees, stablecoin-native gas payments, a built-in decentralized exchange for stable assets, and support for metadata in transfers, all designed to enable high-volume financial applications, including remittances and global payouts.

What is Tempo Blockchain, and how did it start?

Tempo emerged from incubation by Stripe, a payments processor handling over $1.4 trillion in annual volume, and Paradigm, a cryptocurrency investment firm. The project is positioned as a neutral settlement layer for USD-denominated stablecoins, aiming to address persistent pain points cited by payment operators, namely fee volatility, competition with non-payment traffic, and the operational burden of maintaining gas balances across separate assets. According to Tempo’s documentation, the chain is designed to support any compliant USD stablecoin for both transfers and fee payments.

Publicly announced in September 2025, Tempo secured $500 million in a Series A funding round the following month, achieving a $5 billion valuation. Investors included Greenoaks, Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, and SV Angel, many of whom had prior ties to Stripe.

The blockchain is EVM-compatible and built on Reth, a Rust-based Ethereum implementation, enabling developers familiar with Ethereum tools to easily deploy contracts. Tempo targets more than 100,000 transactions per second, with approximately 0.5–0.6-second block finality. These figures are engineering goals rather than production benchmarks, and the team notes that throughput and latency will be validated as additional validators come online. The chain uses a Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus model, providing deterministic finality and eliminating the possibility of chain reorganizations, an attribute that payment operators often prioritize for predictable settlement.

In November 2025, Tempo invested $25 million in Commonware, a blockchain library, to further enhance its performance infrastructure.

Led by Matt Huang, co-founder of Paradigm and a Stripe board member, the team includes engineers from the Ethereum and Rust communities, such as Dragan Rakita, who contributed to Revm and Reth. The project operates as an independent entity, with open-source code under the Apache license, allowing anyone to run nodes or sync the chain. 

What Features Are Available on the Tempo Testnet?

The Tempo testnet includes several features focused on payments. These features support stablecoin transactions through mechanisms such as reserved blockspace and fee stability. The following are key features, as outlined in the protocol's blog.

Dedicated Payment Lanes

On testnet, payments use protocol-reserved blockspace that isolates them from unrelated network activity such as NFT drops or liquidation cascades. In internal benchmarks shared by the team, this structure keeps fees stable even under simulated congestion. While real-world throughput is still being assessed, the model aims to provide predictable transaction costs, which is an operational requirement for processors managing high-volume flows.

Stablecoin-Native Gas

Transaction fees on the testnet can be paid directly in USD-denominated stablecoins. This eliminates the use of volatile gas tokens and enables payment applications to operate in the same currency as their flows, ensuring predictable costs and simpler accounting. For wallets and custodians, it eliminates the need to hold balances of new cryptoassets solely to facilitate stablecoin payments.

Built-in Stable Asset DEX

The testnet includes a native decentralized exchange optimized for stablecoins and tokenized deposits. Users can pay fees in any USD stablecoin, and validators can receive fees in any USD stablecoin, with the protocol handling conversions automatically through onchain liquidity. This also consolidates liquidity into a single system, simplifying routing and enabling trades between stablecoins or cross-stablecoin payments.

Payments and Transfers Metadata

Each transfer on the testnet can include structured memo fields for items like invoice numbers, cost centers, or other identifiers. This enables straightforward reconciliation with existing enterprise resource planning, treasury management, and accounting systems without requiring the development or maintenance of additional code. For larger payloads, references to off-chain data can be made via hashed commitments, which preserve privacy while keeping onchain records auditable.

Fast, Deterministic Finality

The testnet uses Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus, starting with four validators operated by the team, with plans to add more soon. Blocks finalize approximately every 0.5 seconds, and transactions in finalized blocks are guaranteed to be included in the chain. This provides payment operators with settlement certainty comparable to traditional financial systems, along with speed comparable to other blockchains. Future explorations include faster confirmation paths to enable API-speed payment flows.

Modern Wallet Signing Methods

The testnet offers built-in support for gas sponsorship, batch transactions, scheduled payments, and modern authentication via passkeys. This enables developers to implement payment logic without relying on additional middleware or custom contracts.

What Can Users Build on Tempo Testnet? 

Tempo's testnet enables developers and companies to build applications that handle payment workloads in categories central to the global economy. These include remittances and tokenized deposits. 

The blockchain serves as a foundation for these use cases, supported by over 40 infrastructure partners providing tools for developer integration, on- and off-ramps, DeFi applications, and other services. Here’s the breakdown: 

Remittances

Tempo’s deterministic finality model reduces the risk of settlement reordering, a known challenge on probabilistic-finality chains. For remittance firms and payout providers testing the network, this predictability may improve reconciliation workflows. However, full operational reliability will depend on how the system performs as the validator set decentralizes and throughput increases.

Global Payouts

Design partners, including payroll platforms and global commerce networks, use Tempo's dedicated payment lanes to ensure reliability during market volatility. This creates a stable, low-cost system for high-volume disbursements.

Embedded Finance

Developers integrate Tempo's smart accounts and protocol-level memos to embed payment flows into consumer and enterprise applications without building new ledger infrastructure.

Microtransactions

Tempo's fixed-fee model, targeting 0.1 cents per transaction, supports use cases such as usage-based APIs, content streaming, and IoT services by making them economically viable.

Agentic Commerce

Developers in agent frameworks utilize Tempo's programmable accounts and deterministic settlement so agents can transact with immediate finality and predictable fees, independent of volatile token markets.

Tokenized Deposits

Financial institutions are testing Tempo as a base layer for tokenized deposits, leveraging its reconciliation primitives and compliance registry to replicate traditional banking controls with real-time settlement.

Partnerships Driving Tempo's Development

Tempo has assembled partnerships across fintech, banking, e-commerce, and AI sectors to validate its features. Design partners, totaling over 25, include initial collaborators like Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa. Since the September announcement, additions include Brex, Coastal Bank, Cross River, Deel, Faire, Figure, Gusto, Kalshi, Klarna, Mastercard, Payoneer, Persona, Ramp, and UBS.

These partners test real-world workloads: Anthropic and OpenAI explore agentic payments, Mastercard and Visa focus on digital money transfers, Klarna accelerates stablecoin adoption for merchants, and banks like UBS and Deutsche Bank handle tokenized deposits and cross-border flows. E-commerce platforms like Shopify integrate for embedded finance, while DoorDash uses it for payouts.

Infrastructure partners, now exceeding 40, provide tools for building on Tempo. These include wallets such as MetaMask, Phantom, and Privy; stablecoin issuers Agora and Frax; interoperability via LayerZero; compliance monitoring from Chainalysis and TRM Labs; social integration with Farcaster; and developer platforms from Conduit and Alchemy. Additional partners cover on/off-ramps and orchestration, such as Yellow Card and Bridge.

Current Limitations and Areas Under Evaluation

Because Tempo is early in its testnet phase, several aspects remain under active evaluation. The validator set is limited to four operators, meaning decentralization and resilience will evolve as external validators join. 

Performance claims, including throughput targets, have not yet been validated under production-level load. Additionally, developer tooling and ecosystem integrations, while expanding, may require refinement as partners encounter edge cases during onboarding. 

These factors are typical for a payment-focused chain at this stage, but are essential considerations for teams assessing readiness.

What Next For Tempo?

Following the testnet launch, Tempo plans to onboard more partners, develop tools, and test throughput under production loads. The network will transition to full decentralization, starting with validators from partner and independent teams, and will eventually become permissionless.

Tempo has not announced plans for a native token. Community speculation continues on platforms such as X, but the team has not confirmed any token model or distribution framework. Organizations evaluating Tempo for payments should therefore base their assessments on the currently published technical documentation rather than on assumed token incentives.

Tempo's testnet launch integrates specialized payment features, including stable fees and metadata, and fast finality, supported by partnerships and funding aligned with its focus on stablecoin applications. This development provides a practical foundation for remittances, payouts, and tokenized assets, underscoring the reliability of financial blockchain use. 

For entities in payments, exploring Tempo's documentation offers a direct path to assess its fit for operational needs, underscoring the value of targeted infrastructure in scaling onchain transactions.

Sources:

• Yahoo - What is Tempo?

• Blockworks - Tempo Secures $500M in Series A Funding

• CryptoRank - Tempo Funding Rounds

• Tempo Blog - Testnet Announcement and Key Features

• Tempo Documentation - Learn more about the platform