Stripe and Paradigm’s joint blockchain project Tempo has launched its first public testnet, marking a major step forward to launching the official layer-1 blockchain.
According to a Tuesday announcement from Tempo, the open source testnet is now live with anyone being able to “run a node or sync the chain” and test out a range of features.
“Today's testnet launch kicks off the next phase of Tempo's development, with a focus on scale, reliability, and integration experience. Over the coming months, we'll continue onboarding new infrastructure partners, adding new features and developer tooling, and stress-testing throughput under real payment loads,” Tempo said.
The announcement highlighted six key features live on the network. These include: dedicated payment lanes, stablecoin-native gas, built-in stable asset decentralized exchange, payments and transfers metadata, fast deterministic finality and modern wallet signing methods.
“Tempo is built to deliver instant, deterministic settlement, predictably low fees, and a stablecoin-native experience, which are qualities that most general-purpose blockchains still struggle to provide for financial applications,” Tempo said.
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In an X post following the launch, Paradigm general partner and chief technology officer Georgios Konstantopoulos highlighted a feature that enables Tempo testnet users to create stablecoins directly from their browsers.
Stablecoins created on the network will be built via Tempo’s TIP-20 token standard. However, the specific liquidity and collateral requirements for when the actual blockchain launches are not explicitly listed in the testnet docs.
Tempo shows strong momentum as design partners grow
The testnet arrives four months after Stripe and Paradigm initially unveiled Tempo, and three months after it raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation. The project kicked things off with heavy hitter design partners such as OpenAI, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered and Shopify.
In the latest announcement, Tempo emphasized that it has since signed on a host of new design partners, including big names such as Mastercard, UBS, Kalshi and Klarna.
Late last month, Klarna, the EU-licensed buy-now-pay-later firm, rolled out a USD-pegged stablecoin on Tempo, becoming the first digital bank on the network to do so.
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