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There are lots of crypto skeptics on HN (and we ourselves were disappointed with crypto's payments utility for much of the past decade), so it might be interest

by pc 1y ago

There are lots of crypto skeptics on HN (and we ourselves were disappointed with crypto's payments utility for much of the past decade), so it might be interesting to share what changed our mind over the past couple of years: we started to notice a lot of real-world businesses finding utility in stablecoins. For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America. We're currently adding stablecoin functionality to the Stripe dashboard, and the first user is an Argentinian bike importer that finds transacting with their suppliers to be challenging. 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.

nasmorn 1y ago
Because they are legally barred to doing the same thing in USD. Which is exactly what’s going to happen to this once enough people actually use it.
- wmf 1y ago
  The situation has changed. The US is now leaning pro-crypto and they're also for sale.
  - Onavo 1y ago
    And yet USDC has a sanctions mechanisms built in.
  - sroussey 1y ago
    Other countries have controls on currency movements inside and outside their borders.
    - jcfrei 1y ago
      Blockchains (due to constantly changing validators, nodes, etc.) are much harder to shut down than some dedicated service. I think the current administration understands that loose stablecoin regulation further cements US dollar hegemony, curtails other countries attempts to deprive their citizens of payment and savings alternatives and creates more demand for US treasuries (because that's where stablecoin reserves end up). It's a win-win for the US government and bad for governments with a track record of poor fiscal and monetary policy.
      - foobarqux 1y ago
        In practice this isn't true; very few services (in terms of $ spent/earned) are purely virtual and have no physical presence in the country.
      - martin8412 1y ago
        You don’t need to shut down the actual blockchain network participants to kill it for your citizens.
      - fruitworks 1y ago
        Not if the blockchain is developed and administered by a single company!
      - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
        To be honest, a nitpick that i have in this comment is that there are other stablecoins aside from us dollar but most people don't seem to use it. There are gold tokens which I genuinely feel like it can be the best thing ever. Because bitcoin is "digital gold", lmao.... I laugh a lot on this statement nowadays because we genuinely have trustworthy way of having "digital gold" and we don't use that as much as there is hype about bitcoin... But yes currently, it might benefit the us govt. overall
    - wmf 1y ago
      Which Tempo will just ignore.
  - jimkleiber 1y ago
    Is the US leaning pro-crypto or the current administration in power? My guess is that it's like saying the US is leaning towards tariffs, which may or may not be stable.
    - root_axis 1y ago
      You can be assured that future administrations will not be turning off anyone's money spigot, now that the door is open it's impossible to close.
      - jimkleiber 1y ago
        Hmm, I think plenty of administrations (or rather, legislative bodies, if we actually want to get back to the Constitution) have acted in a way that made it less profitable for businesses to operate, so I think it's very possible to close.
        root_axis 1y ago
        Cryptocurrency regulation isn't a cause that most people are passionate about in either direction, so reeling it back in won't afford politicians any popular support. All it can do is create rich enemies who spend lots of money to attack political threats. There's simply no incentive to crack down on it.
        jimkleiber 1y ago
        No incentive? Besides a ton of fraud and regulation skirting? Not all crypto breaks laws but a lot does
    - baggachipz 1y ago
      It's clearly the current administration, seeing as how they profited immensely by offering their own personal shitcoins. I don't think public sentiment has changed much.
  - foobarqux 1y ago
    I think he's talking about foreign governments control on monetary policy, which is essential for managing the economy. Even a poorly run government will insist on retaining control over monetary policy and it provides a necessary forced coordination mechanism for allowing the economy to recover given that it's a prisoner's dilemma otherwise, with every individual preferring to opt out of taking a loss. 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.
    - wmf 1y ago
      The US used to have a policy against dollarizing other countries but I think that's gone now.
  - thrance 1y ago
    If by "pro-crypto" you mean the current president and his wife both did crypto-scams on his first day of presidency, then yeah. Other than that, I wouldn't base anything off of a Trump promise.
- deleted 1y ago
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- dcposch 1y ago
  Many skeptics assume that stablecoins are just about regulatory arbitrage. 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).
  - rfw300 1y ago
    I wonder if some of the non-robustness of the tradfi system is a feature, not a bug. If my account tries to send someone $3 million, I'd prefer that it's intermediated by a confused bank employee staring at a screen rather than a beautifully efficient, irreversible machine consensus. The bottlenecks and intermediaries create friction, sure, but that isn't per se bad. My hang-up with crypto is that it solves the ledger-keeping part of running a financial system, but it isn't clear that's actually the hard part! Preventing and remediating fraud, money laundering, etc. are, and crypto makes those issues worse, not better.
j45 1y ago
Ledger technology has a lot of uses, use cases are what usually get left behind after the hype has died down a bit.
- utyop22 1y ago
  Such as? Always happy to read clear and direct responses.
antirez 1y ago
The problem with all that, is the fact it remains possible to create a protocol with N big institutions (governments and large tech companies, big non profit organizations and so forth) signing every block, to create a collaborative system that is perfectly suited for the same task. The system can make progresses as long a given fractions of the participants is available and so forth, there are a number of well known protocols to do so. This maintains many benefits of the blockchain and lacks many issues (fast, simple, near zero cost, controllable to a given extent -- no takeover possible, ...).
- mikimike 1y ago
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- wslh 1y ago
  I wrote exactly a whitepaper about that, and ironically named it roughchain [1]. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQfZ7xBpWppi_cPc7brO9A/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQf...
- dcposch 1y ago
  > The problem with all that, is the fact it remains possible to create a protocol with N big institutions [...] This maintains many benefits of the blockchain and lacks many issues (fast, simple, near zero cost) 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.
  - serial_dev 1y ago
    I don’t get it yet. If we skipped the whole blockchain part, wouldn’t it be faster, simpler, cheaper? What value does the whole blockchain, EVM, L1 offer? Don’t they fully control the network? Don’t they decide “everything” anyway? I’d love to understand it, I’m not a hater, just a developer who don’t quite get this announcement.
5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN 1y ago
when will stripe go public?
- pixelatedindex 1y ago
  They don’t have to go public if they don’t want to. Being a private company is totally fine.
  - preinheimer 1y ago
    Speaking as a shareholder: It would be kinda swell if they went public though.
rcpt 1y ago
I don't think SpaceX is that great of a data point
- bboygravity 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - cma 1y ago
    Probably his history manipulating crypto markets specifically
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    I mean, I'd like more details on "managing money in long-tail markets" and why it's best done with stablecoins rather than... money.
  - beezlewax 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - Rebelgecko 1y ago
    Presumably because of his issues with the pre-DOGE SEC
deleted 1y ago
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i_love_cookies 1y ago
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brunohaid 1y ago
You still have a lot of credibility to not be put into the number-go-up bracket and the social capital to overcome the political and power structures you had to face for two decades and know more about than most people by having built your company. 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.
- jeremyjh 1y ago
  The fact that Stripe is doing it in 2025 should already be a strong signal. If they were just like the clueless trendmongers who ran crypto initiatives at large institutions in 2019, they'd have done it then instead of now, after the GENIUS act has been passed.
  - nicpottier 1y ago
    Stripe supported Bitcoin for a while as a payment method.. so.. I actually view that as a plus though, they have experience and have seen what works and what doesn't.
jchw 1y ago
A lot of us are not really deep into the finance space. Maybe there's a good reason it's left unsaid, but the question I came away with after reading that page and this comment is, why are businesses finding crypto easier/faster/better? To me, it's not 100% clear exactly who Tempo is for and not for, and why blockchain is more suitable than traditional centralized database technology here. 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.
- nisegami 1y ago
  In the case of Argentina, and similarly for my country, access to USD is fraught and often involves off-market transactions.
  - bloggie 1y ago
    So transactions are difficult because they are illegal, and blockchain helps to facilitate crime? Are there other uses? Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases?
    - jdminhbg 1y ago
      > Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases? You are literally in a thread whose top post is the Stripe founder describing use cases.
      - bloggie 1y ago
        I don't think he does...? He says companies have found utility but doesn't say what that utility is.
        jdminhbg 1y ago
        The sentences that follow “found utility” say what that utility is: > For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America.
barrenko 1y ago
So what should I "buy" to invest in this vision? Eth?
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  That's the fun part, You don't have to "buy" anything to invest in this vision. You just can't "invest" in this vision just as you can't "invest" into treasuries, I mean you could but they don't give 100x the returns. I skimmed through and I don't see anything that promises a lot of returns and THAT'S A GOOD THING. Just like how things like (okay, I was thinking of some universally loved non ipo company and I thought of silksong which is going to get released, so team cherry!!) So if you want to invest into team cherry, the best you can do right now is maybe buy the game but that isn't investing I think its in the similar manner and its a good thing since it prevents frauds and false returns advertising There is (usually) no free lunch. Nothing that can give 100x returns anyway, there is insane competition on things like on beating the market consistenly even with 1% is really hard and only very few companies do and even then, their past record doesn't indicate the future remains the same. Tldr: I am that salesman of index funds. also diversify, s&p have a huge concentration on AI stocks and so please diversify into world stocks or maybe even more into non american stocks since american markets are heavily focused on AI and I doubt that it will play out since the markets do feel like they are in a bubble right now
  - barrenko 1y ago
    Appreciate the input.
- wmf 1y ago
  Definitely not ETH since Tempo replaces Ethereum.
  - barrenko 1y ago
    :thumbs-up
nickitolas 1y ago
Speaking as an argentinian, every time I hear about someone using crypto in that way its to avoid taxes, which seems legally murky/gray (if not directly illegal, but not currently prosecuted) to me.
MarcelOlsz 1y ago
>is providing banking services to customers in Latin America. Checks crypto watch, ah, it's Latin America time again.
throwup238 1y ago
As an extreme skeptic of crypto in general, the uses for stablecoins seem obvious as long as they’re transparently backed or used only for short term transactions before going back into fiat. 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.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  That's exactly the same take as mine. As someone who actually worked on some crypto project (nanotimestamp) and also has got paid in crypto. I usually just convert it into stablecoins / gold coins for a short term (1 year max) where since I am still a minor, I don't have a bank account and so I mean, the end goal is to get my stablecoins out of the chain into real money not vice versa. I had written something like this, just with a clickbaity title but its basically that I hate everything in crypto except stablecoins which I really like. Like there is paxgold which has gold and I genuinely like the fact that I think that we might be able to pay in gold or etc. stuff, I also like USDC too. Here's my article: https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to-fall-the-tech-is-cool-though/ https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- torginus 1y ago
  What? It's not hard to transfer payments to any foreign country with a functioning banking system. The hard part is actually figuring out the legal rules around taxation and employment and contracts that are between two dissimilar legal systems. This doesn't really help that. KYC isn't an 'inconvenience' it's a legal requirement that you (or your employee) can go to jail over if you do not comply with.
Aaronstotle 1y ago
Why do you need a blockchain for this? What benefit does it bring here?
- k__ 1y ago
  Stripe can siphon some of that delicious crypto revenue.
simonw 1y ago
Can you say more about the SpaceX use-case? Are they paying for rocket parts from some of their vendors using crypto?
- matthewmueller 1y ago
  https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/31/stablecoins-are-finding-product-market-fit-in-emerging-markets/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/31/stablecoins-are-finding-pr...
  - simonw 1y ago
    Sounds like it's used for accepting payment from Starlink customers in numerous counties: > The company [SpaceX] partnered with Bridge, a stablecoin payments platform, to accept payments in various currencies and instantly convert them into stablecoins for its global treasury.
  - ec109685 1y ago
    Why can’t bridge just convert the money into USD? What’s the point of the stable coins step?
    - jdminhbg 1y ago
      Once you buy the stablecoins, moving the money anywhere is an API call and a sub-1¢ transaction fee, rather than a cross-border wire transfer and a multi-day settlement process.
      - ec109685 1y ago
        I still don’t know why there is the settlement process. If it was just a row in the database that this person has N dollars, why isn’t that enough?
stevoski 1y ago
“Argentinian bike importer”? A little bit of trouble coming up with enough examples of anyone who wants or needs this, I think?
- hvb2 1y ago
  It's a good example though, a country whose currency is unreliable and where access to another more reliable currency is hard. That IS a use case
  - weswilson 1y ago
    It may be good for the individual, but is it good for Argentina or LATAM as a whole? I'm no economist, but wouldn't shifting transactions from their currency to another (USD/stablecoin) inherently destabilize their economy even more?
jameslk 1y ago
> so it might be interesting to share what changed our mind over the past couple of years I'm guessing the GENIUS Act had something to do with it too? Now that bank depositors have an incentive to hold bank-issued USD stablecoins given their priority in cases of bankruptcy[0], it seems likely there will be a lot more transactions with them as well 0. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1582/text?overview=closed#:~:text=Priority%20in%20Bankruptcy%20Proceedings.%2D%2DSection%20507%20of%20title%2011 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/158...
omarish 1y ago
> 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. One sign of a technology becoming mature is when it stops needing to be the main character. It starts to make room for what it does, not what it is. When thefacebook launched, it wasn't a PHP-based social network; it was a social network for college students. Blockchain has been the main character for a very long time and it's really encouraging to see a product launch like this. Congrats to everyone involved in making this product a reality.
CalChris 1y ago
Compare and contrast L1 to FedNow. 1.5% vs $0.045 per credit transfer $0.01 per request for payment message $1.00 per liquidity management transfer Nice work if you can get it. BTW, it is crypto. So the promise that none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit is a provisional promise at best. Hyrum's Law argues an opposite future.
- chrisweekly 1y ago
  Hyrum's Law states that developers will depend on all observable traits and behaviors of an interface, even if they are not defined in the contract. - It rang a bell but I had to look it up, figured I'd share to save others the trouble.
- dedoussis 1y ago
  FedNow is limited to domestic US transactions
- DennisP 1y ago
  Which L1 do you mean? I don't see any fee amounts on Tempo's page. Most stablecoin transactions are on Ethereum and the fees are neither percentages nor fixed dollar amounts. They just have congestion pricing, so it depends on how expensive your transaction is to run and how much traffic there is.
  - CalChris 1y ago
    We charge 1.5% of the transaction amount (in USD). https://docs.stripe.com/crypto/stablecoin-payments https://docs.stripe.com/crypto/stablecoin-payments
    - DennisP 1y ago
      That is Stripe's fee. If you use the blockchain directly instead of through Stripe, you don't pay that.
cyberax 1y ago
> For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets Do they use it to arbitrate NFTs? (need more jargon) Because SpaceX is definitely something that screams "finance" to me.
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  Yeah, I’d like clarification on what SpaceX is doing, ‘managing money in long tail markets’ is essentially meaningless.
  - jdminhbg 1y ago
    "Long tail markets" here means small countries with currencies you don't have any particular interest in holding. Starlink sells access in Benin and South Sudan, for example, that's the long tail.
    - quickthrowman 1y ago
      “Avoiding forex risk” is only three words, I hate corporate communications. Why can’t people just say what they mean, sigh.
k__ 1y ago
If it's EVM compatible it's irrelevant that it's focus is on stable coins. People can build their own smart contracts and speculate.
weitendorf 1y ago
Can you explain some of the technical goals of your project and the overall model you're thinking about implementing? You mentioned sub-cent tx fees, 100k tps, and what I presume to be atomic swaps for stablecoins. Are you thinking about something like $0.10 fees or something like $0.0001 fees? At $0.10 fees at 100ktps that end up representing $100/s in tx costs which is about $8.6M/day or $3B/year. Presumably you expect to make more per year on this project in the ideal case, so are you intending to allow the fees or TPS to "float" upward, or to restrict participation in the L1 to only trusted partners, or for the network operators to make money off the interest from holding the stablecoins' currencies in reserve? What if demand exceeds 100k tps? Since this will be a corporate backed project how do you plan to handle sanctions and government currency controls, eg if Uncle Sam tells you to drop support for Iranian currency, how will that work? Will there be account/transaction privacy built into the network through ring cryptography or zk proofs? I'm assuming no, but if your answer is yes and Uncle Sam takes issue with that, what is your plan?
- weitendorf 1y ago
  Oops, my math was off. I meant $0.001/tx at 100ktps=$100/s=$8.6M/day=$3B/yr
dperfect 1y ago
It sounds great, but every time I see this argument, I end up going down the rabbit hole of actually studying how stablecoins operate. And every time, I come to the same conclusion: they always rely on trust in an off-chain oracle or custodian. At that point, a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent. Bitcoin (and possibly a few others) is one of the few uses of blockchain that actually makes sense. The blockchain serves the currency, and the currency serves the blockchain. The blockchain exists to provide consensus without needing to trust any off-chain entity, but the blockchain relies on computing infrastructure that has real-world costs. The scarcity of Bitcoin (the currency) and arguably-fictitious reward for participation in mining is the incentive for people in the real world to contribute resources required for the blockchain to function. Any real-world value given to Bitcoin is secondary and only a result of the fact that (1) mining infrastructure has a cost, and (2) people who understand the system have realized that, unlike fiat, stablecoins, or 1000 other crypto products, Bitcoin has no reliance on trusted, off-chain entities who could manipulate it. You trust your stablecoin's issuer that they hold enough fiat in reserve to match the coin? You might as well trust your bank, but while you're at it, remind them that they don't have to take days to process a transaction - they could process transactions as fast as (actually faster than) a blockchain. But I imagine most banks would point to regulation as a reason for the delays, and they might be right. So what are stablecoins really trying to do? Circumvent regulation? Implement something the banks just aren't willing to do themselves?
- ksk23 1y ago
  European Union forced all banks that offer instant-transfers to make them for free starting 26‘ if I remember correctly. That works rather well!
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  Bitcoin makes the least sense of any of these schemes. Proof of work is just proof of sota ASIC ownership, which is just proof of stake by another name. Why not just use POS like everyone else and avoid dumping the carbon? Bitcoin is going to be one of those things in the history books that will seem utterly incomprehensibly irresponsible to future generations.
AquinasCoder 1y ago
The stripe conference focused more than I would have liked on crypto. I completely understand that there are markets and customers that can find real utility in it, but I wonder how many businesses will really ever benefit from stablecoins. We're in higher education, and potentially our international clients could avoid hiccups with regulation, delays, compliance, and more using stablecoins, but it's really a guess. In the meantime, the pricing model of stripe seems to prioritize bigger and bigger clients. That being said from Stripe's perspective stablecoins an easy bet to make. They win by building payment infrastructure within the traditional payment ecosystem and win by providing an alternative completely outside of it.
asim 1y ago
> Who will run validator nodes? "A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model." I think Zuck tried to do this. It was called Libra or Diem or I can't remember what it ended up being. Ultimately trust is what matters. In the end whether it was regulation or governments or anything else that killed it, it's only going to work if people can trust you. They trusted you with fiat payments, maybe they'll trust you with crypto. The thing to note, you'll win over the US centric crowd but it's unclear if it will translate truly across borders to Europe, Russia, China, etc. I'm guessing that doesn't matter but just remember what happened. Make sure to be honest about who's actually going to run the payment rails here.
- jekrb 1y ago
  Libra/Diem was told by regulators to not move forward with the project. They were very early days, and trying to "do it right" in which the administration said "not at all". Similar also happened with Visa... check when they were publishing in-depth reports from their crypto arm and then suddenly stopped.
- asim 1y ago
  Further to my point https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/09/07/stripe-s-tempo-blockchain-is-a-referendum-on-the-ghost-of-libra-says-libra-co-creator https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/09/07/stripe-s-tempo-bl...
ViewTrick1002 1y ago
> We're currently adding stablecoin functionality to the Stripe dashboard, and the first user is an Argentinian bike importer that finds transacting with their suppliers to be challenging. Using crypto to dodge currency controls? Of course I agree that currency controls are bad. But, if the use case for crypto keeps being fostering illegal transactions then it doesn’t solve anything a functioning economy needs.
- logicchains 1y ago
  >But, if the use case for crypto keeps being fostering illegal transactions then it doesn’t solve anything a functioning economy needs. In many countries what the economy needs to function well includes things that are illegal.
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    Which means it will only ever be a tiny niche market since the amounts are irrelevant when the service is needed. Then as the country’s economy develops the need for these illegal services disappear, or quickly gets you in trouble.
    - logicchains 1y ago
      >Then as the country’s economy develops the need for these illegal services disappear, or quickly gets you in trouble. This is not necessarily the case given how large the online illegal drugs market is in pretty much every developed country. Just because weed was legalised, it doesn't mean all other narcotics will be legalised in future too.
      - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
        Which given the busts of Silkroad etc. and countries changing the laws allowing them to search mail making delivery more perilous, has again withdrawn to a physical hands on market. Or do you suggest to send some stable coins when meeting the local dealer?!?!
farco12 1y ago
Patrick, congratulations on launching Tempo. If there was a company where it actually made sense to build and use a blockchain it would be Stripe. The website is a bit painful to read but I thought it provided good general information for potential partners. As as a dev, my questions are why did your team decide to build a new L1 chain instead of an Ethereum L2 and why did you all stick with the EVM architecture instead of looking at something like the MoveVM?
thelittleone 1y ago
Hey Patrick, When your algorithm freezes a legit business's funds, you hold them indefinitely and can invest them for your own profit. The only recourse you offer is mandatory arbitration with an arbitrator Stripe chooses. How is that a fair system?
- financetechbro 1y ago
  It’s a fair system for stripe!
anonymouse008 1y ago
“The way out of interchange”
xipho 1y ago
If the only two examples that are presented are "SpaceX" and "Latin America" can we not dismiss any further importance on the conflict-of-interest aspect alone? A completely failed experiment, and a company that can create millions simply by tweeting- who buys this?
pluc 1y ago
So Elon Musk and Nayib Bukele. Two solid reasons.
knorker 1y ago
That just sounds like "one clever trick" to not pay taxes, import duties, or follow laws. Or can you explain how these bike importers are being hampered in fiat not by laws, but by technology? Every time I look at this, the "clever trick" is actually law evasion / law avoidance, to borrow a tax term. It's about as "clever" as lying to the IRS to save money on taxes. That was never a loophole.
hitradostava 1y ago
Patrick, the problems you describe (speed, cost, cross-border friction) already have solutions. SEPA Instant, FedNow, PIX, and providers like Wise move money in seconds, at negligible cost, inside regulated systems. Tempo doesn’t solve payments; it sidesteps oversight. By shifting flows onto a private stablecoin ledger, Stripe isn’t fixing inefficiency; it’s making it easier to route money in ways regulators and tax authorities can’t easily monitor. That’s not innovation, it’s the oldest trick in the crypto playbook: pretend you’re improving payments, when what you’re really selling is a way around the rules.
- horseradish7k 1y ago
  did you write your comment?
resters 1y ago
Makes sense. Stablecoins in the new regulatory landscape offer significant efficiency gains in the provisioning of lots of innovative financial services (and also typical ones). Does Stripe have a perspective on the unique systemic risks that stablecoin exposure might end up having in the new regulatory landscape?
Zigurd 1y ago
That Stripe is involved is probably the best endorsement of Stripe being involved in crypto. Banking in South America is something crypto skeptics have heard for many years now. I was involved in a project that combined crypto with mesh networking. The launch was going to take place in South America. Why? Because university students in Brazil are desperate for a little bit of side hustle money, and incentives could cross borders easily using crypto. This was backed by first tier VC that had a number of crypto investments, including fundamental crypto technologies, alongside other more mundane things. Nobody involved in the project had any intention of creating a bunch of poor student bag holders. Nevertheless, the combination of mesh networking and crypto based incentivization wasn't enough to even turn it into the next Helium (they still around?) SpaceX using crypto? Are any of their customers seriously going to pay using crypto? Are they gonna pay any of their bills using crypto? I'm not trying to piss in your Cheerios. But making real world use cases not die of uselessness is going to be a challenge.
Izikiel43 1y ago
> and the first user is an Argentinian bike importer that finds transacting with their suppliers to be challenging. I'm not surprised, capital controls come and go there, and when they come, they stay for several years.
verdverm 1y ago
Crypto plus doing business with Musk? Not sure you'll win many hearts and minds You could achieve the same things with a proof-of-authority ledger instead of a "stable" coin
spaceman_2020 1y ago
My biggest reason to be a crypto believer right now is stablecoins, international payments, and agentic AI. It's inevitable that agentic AI will handle a lot of workload online eventually. We can't expect these agents to work on existing payment rails, what with their fees and slow settlement and international payment hurdles. AI agents that can pay each other when necessary - even tiny fractional amounts - will be a massive use case.
- shomp 1y ago
  That can pay each other? For what? Genuinely curious.
  - spaceman_2020 1y ago
    I would imagine that eventually you'd want to gate some data. Like you want your AI agent to get the lastest financial data from Bloomberg and Bloomberg charges you $0.01 per query
PKop 1y ago
What about the tax implications of every transaction being a taxable event? Are you tracking all of this for tax purposes? These transactions all have to be reported to the IRS even for stable coins. This is the biggest thing making crypto payments a non-starter. What's the story here from the end-user's perspective? I as an individual have no interest in stacking stable coins if when I spend them to businesses, I have to meticulously track each transaction and report it. Whatever you're doing for businesses doesn't seem like it would solve this problem for individuals, if you're even solving it for businesses themselves that is.
1oooqooq 1y ago
i read this move as "we were skeptics like anyone with a brain, but also now trump allowed stable coins to offer pyramid like incentives and only a fool wouldn't jump on that easy money." https://www.wired.com/story/genius-act-loophole-stablecoins-banks/ https://www.wired.com/story/genius-act-loophole-stablecoins-...
raggi 1y ago
Can you expand on "easier" and "faster" in easier/faster/better. I understand "better" in terms of transparency, shared standards for integration, and various other properties. I can less immediately expand "easier" and "faster". Easier: on chain VMs are far from simple or easy, recovery from mistakes is far more complex. Some other aspects such as the implicit common standard might reduce some amount of need for "green field agreement", and the implicit openness of the protocols avoid some of the traps of "here's a rest api, go", but is this the focus? When you look at a wide variety of the big ticket items in everything that needs doing, is the total set easier? Are there surprises there? Faster: similar to above, this claim is surprising. There's a lot of by-design overhead to a cryptographic ledger system. Lots of things that can be done to make it wider, to reduce latency and increase throughput, but at a fundamental level core operations such as transaction creation require a lot more processing going into a ledger than into a traditional database, even one at scale. Maybe faster here isn't about system faster, but time to product delivery? If so is that common standards? Are there surprises here too, what were they? Edit: I see elsewhere in the thread you provide some answers in a slightly different framing. A potentially unfair paraphrase and summary seems to be that this enabled integrations to bypass expensive incumbents and comparatively poor traditional infrastructure. If that's a reasonable approximation my question is this: what if you dropped good sized chunks of the blockchain part that is the main system bottleneck, but kept the rest of the properties (shared micro computation model, shared transaction model, common API standard and protocol, eradication of foot dragging incumbents etc).?
- buildbuildbuild 1y ago
  Easier: I can earn or spend real money 24/7 without anyone’s permission, at any age, in any location. Faster: Payments settle lightning fast compared to ACH/Wires, permanently and internationally. Better: I don’t need anyone’s approval to be “banked” and I don’t have to operate in fear of clawbacks. Programs are the ultimate unbanked, and that’s the “agentic economy” that is emerging.
  - raggi 1y ago
    Please forgive my pushback but: No third party: Almost certainly as a user there are still third parties involved, this isn't (AFAICS and based on other discussions) a user facing chain (edit: correction, they do say the chain is public, but here I really mean user facing value: you aren't minting stablecoins, you have to get them from somewhere). At "envisioned" transaction rates you would in practice not be syncing the chain and interacting with it yourself in any meaningful way. Settlement: chain settlement is different from financial settlement. Between clearing ends there will still need to be sufficient demonstration of KYC, exchange of some form of actual holdings and so on. Typically the attraction of /to stablecoins is that they're used to perform transactions ahead of movement of actualizable value in target currencies. A possible alternative model is that all invested parties sink actual value into a global sink fund backing the stablecoin that is sufficiently protected to ensure that it does not devalue. In practice organizations almost certainly aren't going to part with wealth on those volumes and will operate secondary private exchange markets and settlement in bulk to escape concerns of short term loss, leverage, inflation and many other dynamics.
smoyer 1y ago
We're starting to seek access to our services using the x402 protocol. It's practical for micro-payments and can facilitate subscriptions and most importantly, completely under the control of the end user. See https://x402.org https://x402.org
0x10ca1h0st 1y ago
Invest in echi coin and then we can talk about your coin! ;)
karlgkk 1y ago
Lazy vibe check, building a stable coin is way easier than running settlement or a clearing house. So I get it I guess! Edit: I’m only joking a little bit
8bitbeep 1y ago
> crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante. It must be ignorance on my part or perhaps I’m just lucky with residency and clients, but I get paid through services like Wise frequently. Taxes are pretty reasonable and I receive the money instantly on my bank account from US, Europe or Latin America. I don’t really know much better it needs to get. I can never understand what problem stablecoins are trying to solve.
crossroadsguy 1y ago
A “stable” coin is as much a “crypto” as is a fast turtle fast.
danielmarkbruce 1y ago
You have basically said "there is a real problem here" and "stablecoins are better than what there was before". Did you look at a non crypto/stablecoin solution to perhaps find something even better for legitimate businesses (and perhaps worse for crooks)?
citizenpaul 1y ago
I'm a crypto disappoin-ic. Seems like humans simply cannot un-shackle themselves from central control no matter how low the bar. The second crypto got steam the scammers, criminals and con artists were on it so fast fly's would be embarrassed by their shameless dive into feces. Long term I'm still more optimistic on crypto than AI. I think part of the problem with crypto is it needs to be around longer than some government money to prove to people it has staying power. Only then will financial people start doing things like recommend a small crypto stash for your retirement just in case. The average person is not going to make the necessary critical mass move into crypto without some sort permission saying its ok and not going to risk all their money or jail time.
keepamovin 1y ago
Does Stripe plan to offer its own variety of coins in future?
3uler 1y ago
This is exactly how you bootstrap payment rails to compete with Visa/MC. Merchants would do anything to reduce the 2-3% they’re bleeding to the card schemes. Everyone focuses on consumer adoption, but merchants push payment methods customers don’t love all the time - ACH transfers, store cards, cash discounts. If stablecoins can cut interchange from 2-3% to near zero, merchants will drive adoption through discounts and incentives. Gas stations where card fees destroy margins, high-volume retailers - get a few major players offering meaningful stablecoin discounts and suddenly consumers have a reason to figure out the wallets.
hiq 1y ago
Quoting https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...: > Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype. In particular, using the term "blockchain"/"crypto" to talk about something more centralized / permissioned than e.g. Bitcoin is missing the point: these systems already existed before. So what do you mean by "crypto" exactly? Distributed systems? I don't think you'll find many distributed systems skeptics on HN.
cogogo 1y ago
> For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. I genuinely do not understand this example. What is spacex actually doing? And why do they even have money in “long tail markets” at all?
- kasey_junk 1y ago
  I don’t know anything about this specific case but it is common for manufacturers to have currency needs in long tail markets to facilitate payments to subsidiaries, vendors and employees in all the places they do business.
justin66 1y ago
> so it might be interesting to share what changed our mind One can look at Stripe's list of investors...
solarkraft 1y ago
> 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. I still don’t quite understand the point of using crypto then - there’s no advantage in it theoretically being decentalizable since practically it is not. It might as well be an implementation detail. Or are there decentral aspects to how it works? Does it ease auditing? Is it the improved ease of financial/regulatory engineering?
Self-Perfection 1y ago
Why new blockchain? There are already several of them that provide constant low fees and scaling to ~100k tps on L1.
ftmz 1y ago
Fernando from DolarApp here. To add some context: our clients in LatAm use DolarApp to spend internationally with a card at the best rates, send and receive cross-border transfers (not just remittances, but also payroll), and to keep their savings pegged to the dollar. Stablecoins let us deliver a much better user experience and significantly lower fees — in some countries, up to 10x better than incumbents. That said, most of our users don’t care about the underlying infrastructure. They care about the benefits. It’s similar to how someone using a bank card at an ATM doesn’t know (or care) that the system might be running on COBOL. We see it as our job as product people to absorb that complexity so our users get the benefits without having to deal with the complex mechanics behind them. That’s what we believe is helping unlock a platform shift.
- lokar 1y ago
  Why did this need blockchain? Why could you not use a central private e-money system w/ a good API? It sounds like you think they don't really care about the implementation?
  - moreau 1y ago
    Because governments in developing countries won't be able to ban it.
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1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America." https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonmikula_fintech-partner-axiom-bank-na-was-deemed-activity-7253755592882688000-4IVS https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonmikula_fintech-partner-a... When this bank employee expressed skepticism of "DolarApp" he was faced retaliation: https://ia800508.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.flmd.419865/gov.uscourts.flmd.419865.1.0.pdf https://ia800508.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.flmd.4... "10. In and around the spring of 2023, Mr. Ibrahim became uncomfortable with certain practices and activities in which the Bank began to become involved. These included practices that, in Mr. Ibrahims opinion, jeopardized the Banks compliance with anti-money laundering laws, federal safety and soundness requirements for depository institutions, and compliance with specific OCC regulations and requirements that were particularly imperative due to the fact that the Bank was already considered a Troubled Institution 14. Mr. Ibrahim further objected to Axioms initiation of new business programs, without first obtaining non-objection letters from the OCC and without review by the Banks internal New Product Risk Committee, as required by written policies. One such project, DolarApp, was of particular concern to Mr. Ibrahim as it entailed cross-border movement of funds, which triggered significant concerns as to whether the Banks BSA/AML controls are sufficient, among other things. 15. But when Ibrahim raised these concerns with the CEO, Ross Breunig, he told Ibrahim to the effect that he did not want to hear it and shut down the conversation. 18. Almost immediately after Mr. Ibrahim objected to these practices, Axiom and Mr. Breunig began a pattern of retaliation. After the April 2023 leadership meeting where Mr. Ibrahim raised concerns relating to CSI and the DolarApp, Mr. Breunig began canceling Executive Board of Director meetings that Mr. Ibrahim attended. 19. Following a leadership meeting in May 2023, where again Mr. Ibrahim raised concerns about CSI, DolarApp and the overdraft positions, Mr. Ibrahim began receiving email cancellations to multiple committees and Board meetings. 20. Upon inquiry, Mr. Ibrahim learned the meetings were not being canceled, but rather he was being uninvited without explanation. Mr. Breunigs hostility with Mr. Ibrahim also became noticeably apparent during this time." Of course Stripe, Inc. is neither a Troubled Bank nor an untroubled one Anyway, it sounds like DolarApp could be useful for evading anti-money laundering and bank secrecy laws "Importantly, none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit." That's only one of the many reasons people might be skeptical of crypto. See above "They're performing real-world financial activity, and they've found that crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante." How much of this "real world financial activity" is not criminally culpable 100% no doubt
topranks 1y ago
Isn’t the advantage of Stablecoins just that you can avoid regulation when it comes to payments, especially across borders? Otherwise why not just use normal digital payments? I fail to see why a blockchain is needed to log the transactions.
bryan2 1y ago
What is the benefit over cash? I’ve heard stable coins are beneficial for the owners of the coin because it’s basically an interest free loan to the token owner.
camgunz 1y ago
"Trump isn't pursuing financial crimes on blockchains, so we're cashing in as quickly as possible"
lopezvicky7649 1y ago
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lopezvicky7649 1y ago
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by pc 1y ago

nasmorn 1y ago

Because they are legally barred to doing the same thing in USD. Which is exactly what’s going to happen to this once enough people actually use it.

wmf 1y ago
The situation has changed. The US is now leaning pro-crypto and they're also for sale.
- Onavo 1y ago
  And yet USDC has a sanctions mechanisms built in.
- sroussey 1y ago
  Other countries have controls on currency movements inside and outside their borders.
  - jcfrei 1y ago
    Blockchains (due to constantly changing validators, nodes, etc.) are much harder to shut down than some dedicated service. I think the current administration understands that loose stablecoin regulation further cements US dollar hegemony, curtails other countries attempts to deprive their citizens of payment and savings alternatives and creates more demand for US treasuries (because that's where stablecoin reserves end up). It's a win-win for the US government and bad for governments with a track record of poor fiscal and monetary policy.
    - foobarqux 1y ago
      In practice this isn't true; very few services (in terms of $ spent/earned) are purely virtual and have no physical presence in the country.
    - martin8412 1y ago
      You don’t need to shut down the actual blockchain network participants to kill it for your citizens.
    - fruitworks 1y ago
      Not if the blockchain is developed and administered by a single company!
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      To be honest, a nitpick that i have in this comment is that there are other stablecoins aside from us dollar but most people don't seem to use it. There are gold tokens which I genuinely feel like it can be the best thing ever. Because bitcoin is "digital gold", lmao.... I laugh a lot on this statement nowadays because we genuinely have trustworthy way of having "digital gold" and we don't use that as much as there is hype about bitcoin... But yes currently, it might benefit the us govt. overall
  - wmf 1y ago
    Which Tempo will just ignore.
- jimkleiber 1y ago
  Is the US leaning pro-crypto or the current administration in power? My guess is that it's like saying the US is leaning towards tariffs, which may or may not be stable.
  - root_axis 1y ago
    You can be assured that future administrations will not be turning off anyone's money spigot, now that the door is open it's impossible to close.
    - jimkleiber 1y ago
      Hmm, I think plenty of administrations (or rather, legislative bodies, if we actually want to get back to the Constitution) have acted in a way that made it less profitable for businesses to operate, so I think it's very possible to close.
      - root_axis 1y ago
        Cryptocurrency regulation isn't a cause that most people are passionate about in either direction, so reeling it back in won't afford politicians any popular support. All it can do is create rich enemies who spend lots of money to attack political threats. There's simply no incentive to crack down on it.
        jimkleiber 1y ago
        No incentive? Besides a ton of fraud and regulation skirting? Not all crypto breaks laws but a lot does
  - baggachipz 1y ago
    It's clearly the current administration, seeing as how they profited immensely by offering their own personal shitcoins. I don't think public sentiment has changed much.
- foobarqux 1y ago
  I think he's talking about foreign governments control on monetary policy, which is essential for managing the economy. Even a poorly run government will insist on retaining control over monetary policy and it provides a necessary forced coordination mechanism for allowing the economy to recover given that it's a prisoner's dilemma otherwise, with every individual preferring to opt out of taking a loss. 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.
  - wmf 1y ago
    The US used to have a policy against dollarizing other countries but I think that's gone now.
- thrance 1y ago
  If by "pro-crypto" you mean the current president and his wife both did crypto-scams on his first day of presidency, then yeah. Other than that, I wouldn't base anything off of a Trump promise.
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dcposch 1y ago
Many skeptics assume that stablecoins are just about regulatory arbitrage. 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).
- rfw300 1y ago
  I wonder if some of the non-robustness of the tradfi system is a feature, not a bug. If my account tries to send someone $3 million, I'd prefer that it's intermediated by a confused bank employee staring at a screen rather than a beautifully efficient, irreversible machine consensus. The bottlenecks and intermediaries create friction, sure, but that isn't per se bad. My hang-up with crypto is that it solves the ledger-keeping part of running a financial system, but it isn't clear that's actually the hard part! Preventing and remediating fraud, money laundering, etc. are, and crypto makes those issues worse, not better.

j45 1y ago

Ledger technology has a lot of uses, use cases are what usually get left behind after the hype has died down a bit.

utyop22 1y ago
Such as? Always happy to read clear and direct responses.

antirez 1y ago

The problem with all that, is the fact it remains possible to create a protocol with N big institutions (governments and large tech companies, big non profit organizations and so forth) signing every block, to create a collaborative system that is perfectly suited for the same task. The system can make progresses as long a given fractions of the participants is available and so forth, there are a number of well known protocols to do so. This maintains many benefits of the blockchain and lacks many issues (fast, simple, near zero cost, controllable to a given extent -- no takeover possible, ...).

mikimike 1y ago
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wslh 1y ago
I wrote exactly a whitepaper about that, and ironically named it roughchain [1]. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQfZ7xBpWppi_cPc7brO9A/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQf...
dcposch 1y ago
> The problem with all that, is the fact it remains possible to create a protocol with N big institutions [...] This maintains many benefits of the blockchain and lacks many issues (fast, simple, near zero cost) 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.
- serial_dev 1y ago
  I don’t get it yet. If we skipped the whole blockchain part, wouldn’t it be faster, simpler, cheaper? What value does the whole blockchain, EVM, L1 offer? Don’t they fully control the network? Don’t they decide “everything” anyway? I’d love to understand it, I’m not a hater, just a developer who don’t quite get this announcement.

5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN 1y ago

when will stripe go public?

pixelatedindex 1y ago
They don’t have to go public if they don’t want to. Being a private company is totally fine.
- preinheimer 1y ago
  Speaking as a shareholder: It would be kinda swell if they went public though.

rcpt 1y ago

I don't think SpaceX is that great of a data point

bboygravity 1y ago
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- cma 1y ago
  Probably his history manipulating crypto markets specifically
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
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- ceejayoz 1y ago
  I mean, I'd like more details on "managing money in long-tail markets" and why it's best done with stablecoins rather than... money.
- beezlewax 1y ago
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- Rebelgecko 1y ago
  Presumably because of his issues with the pre-DOGE SEC

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i_love_cookies 1y ago

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brunohaid 1y ago

You still have a lot of credibility to not be put into the number-go-up bracket and the social capital to overcome the political and power structures you had to face for two decades and know more about than most people by having built your company. 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.

jeremyjh 1y ago
The fact that Stripe is doing it in 2025 should already be a strong signal. If they were just like the clueless trendmongers who ran crypto initiatives at large institutions in 2019, they'd have done it then instead of now, after the GENIUS act has been passed.
- nicpottier 1y ago
  Stripe supported Bitcoin for a while as a payment method.. so.. I actually view that as a plus though, they have experience and have seen what works and what doesn't.

jchw 1y ago

A lot of us are not really deep into the finance space. Maybe there's a good reason it's left unsaid, but the question I came away with after reading that page and this comment is, why are businesses finding crypto easier/faster/better? To me, it's not 100% clear exactly who Tempo is for and not for, and why blockchain is more suitable than traditional centralized database technology here. 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.

nisegami 1y ago
In the case of Argentina, and similarly for my country, access to USD is fraught and often involves off-market transactions.
- bloggie 1y ago
  So transactions are difficult because they are illegal, and blockchain helps to facilitate crime? Are there other uses? Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases?
  - jdminhbg 1y ago
    > Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases? You are literally in a thread whose top post is the Stripe founder describing use cases.
    - bloggie 1y ago
      I don't think he does...? He says companies have found utility but doesn't say what that utility is.
      - jdminhbg 1y ago
        The sentences that follow “found utility” say what that utility is: > For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America.

barrenko 1y ago

So what should I "buy" to invest in this vision? Eth?

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
That's the fun part, You don't have to "buy" anything to invest in this vision. You just can't "invest" in this vision just as you can't "invest" into treasuries, I mean you could but they don't give 100x the returns. I skimmed through and I don't see anything that promises a lot of returns and THAT'S A GOOD THING. Just like how things like (okay, I was thinking of some universally loved non ipo company and I thought of silksong which is going to get released, so team cherry!!) So if you want to invest into team cherry, the best you can do right now is maybe buy the game but that isn't investing I think its in the similar manner and its a good thing since it prevents frauds and false returns advertising There is (usually) no free lunch. Nothing that can give 100x returns anyway, there is insane competition on things like on beating the market consistenly even with 1% is really hard and only very few companies do and even then, their past record doesn't indicate the future remains the same. Tldr: I am that salesman of index funds. also diversify, s&p have a huge concentration on AI stocks and so please diversify into world stocks or maybe even more into non american stocks since american markets are heavily focused on AI and I doubt that it will play out since the markets do feel like they are in a bubble right now
- barrenko 1y ago
  Appreciate the input.
wmf 1y ago
Definitely not ETH since Tempo replaces Ethereum.
- barrenko 1y ago
  :thumbs-up

nickitolas 1y ago

Speaking as an argentinian, every time I hear about someone using crypto in that way its to avoid taxes, which seems legally murky/gray (if not directly illegal, but not currently prosecuted) to me.

MarcelOlsz 1y ago

>is providing banking services to customers in Latin America. Checks crypto watch, ah, it's Latin America time again.

throwup238 1y ago

As an extreme skeptic of crypto in general, the uses for stablecoins seem obvious as long as they’re transparently backed or used only for short term transactions before going back into fiat. 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.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
That's exactly the same take as mine. As someone who actually worked on some crypto project (nanotimestamp) and also has got paid in crypto. I usually just convert it into stablecoins / gold coins for a short term (1 year max) where since I am still a minor, I don't have a bank account and so I mean, the end goal is to get my stablecoins out of the chain into real money not vice versa. I had written something like this, just with a clickbaity title but its basically that I hate everything in crypto except stablecoins which I really like. Like there is paxgold which has gold and I genuinely like the fact that I think that we might be able to pay in gold or etc. stuff, I also like USDC too. Here's my article: https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to-fall-the-tech-is-cool-though/ https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...
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torginus 1y ago
What? It's not hard to transfer payments to any foreign country with a functioning banking system. The hard part is actually figuring out the legal rules around taxation and employment and contracts that are between two dissimilar legal systems. This doesn't really help that. KYC isn't an 'inconvenience' it's a legal requirement that you (or your employee) can go to jail over if you do not comply with.

Aaronstotle 1y ago

Why do you need a blockchain for this? What benefit does it bring here?

k__ 1y ago
Stripe can siphon some of that delicious crypto revenue.

simonw 1y ago

Can you say more about the SpaceX use-case? Are they paying for rocket parts from some of their vendors using crypto?

matthewmueller 1y ago
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/31/stablecoins-are-finding-product-market-fit-in-emerging-markets/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/31/stablecoins-are-finding-pr...
- simonw 1y ago
  Sounds like it's used for accepting payment from Starlink customers in numerous counties: > The company [SpaceX] partnered with Bridge, a stablecoin payments platform, to accept payments in various currencies and instantly convert them into stablecoins for its global treasury.
- ec109685 1y ago
  Why can’t bridge just convert the money into USD? What’s the point of the stable coins step?
  - jdminhbg 1y ago
    Once you buy the stablecoins, moving the money anywhere is an API call and a sub-1¢ transaction fee, rather than a cross-border wire transfer and a multi-day settlement process.
    - ec109685 1y ago
      I still don’t know why there is the settlement process. If it was just a row in the database that this person has N dollars, why isn’t that enough?

stevoski 1y ago

“Argentinian bike importer”? A little bit of trouble coming up with enough examples of anyone who wants or needs this, I think?

hvb2 1y ago
It's a good example though, a country whose currency is unreliable and where access to another more reliable currency is hard. That IS a use case
- weswilson 1y ago
  It may be good for the individual, but is it good for Argentina or LATAM as a whole? I'm no economist, but wouldn't shifting transactions from their currency to another (USD/stablecoin) inherently destabilize their economy even more?

jameslk 1y ago

> so it might be interesting to share what changed our mind over the past couple of years I'm guessing the GENIUS Act had something to do with it too? Now that bank depositors have an incentive to hold bank-issued USD stablecoins given their priority in cases of bankruptcy[0], it seems likely there will be a lot more transactions with them as well 0. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1582/text?overview=closed#:~:text=Priority%20in%20Bankruptcy%20Proceedings.%2D%2DSection%20507%20of%20title%2011 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/158...

omarish 1y ago

> 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. One sign of a technology becoming mature is when it stops needing to be the main character. It starts to make room for what it does, not what it is. When thefacebook launched, it wasn't a PHP-based social network; it was a social network for college students. Blockchain has been the main character for a very long time and it's really encouraging to see a product launch like this. Congrats to everyone involved in making this product a reality.

CalChris 1y ago

Compare and contrast L1 to FedNow. 1.5% vs $0.045 per credit transfer $0.01 per request for payment message $1.00 per liquidity management transfer Nice work if you can get it. BTW, it is crypto. So the promise that none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit is a provisional promise at best. Hyrum's Law argues an opposite future.

chrisweekly 1y ago
Hyrum's Law states that developers will depend on all observable traits and behaviors of an interface, even if they are not defined in the contract. - It rang a bell but I had to look it up, figured I'd share to save others the trouble.
dedoussis 1y ago
FedNow is limited to domestic US transactions
DennisP 1y ago
Which L1 do you mean? I don't see any fee amounts on Tempo's page. Most stablecoin transactions are on Ethereum and the fees are neither percentages nor fixed dollar amounts. They just have congestion pricing, so it depends on how expensive your transaction is to run and how much traffic there is.
- CalChris 1y ago
  We charge 1.5% of the transaction amount (in USD). https://docs.stripe.com/crypto/stablecoin-payments https://docs.stripe.com/crypto/stablecoin-payments
  - DennisP 1y ago
    That is Stripe's fee. If you use the blockchain directly instead of through Stripe, you don't pay that.

cyberax 1y ago

> For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets Do they use it to arbitrate NFTs? (need more jargon) Because SpaceX is definitely something that screams "finance" to me.

quickthrowman 1y ago
Yeah, I’d like clarification on what SpaceX is doing, ‘managing money in long tail markets’ is essentially meaningless.
- jdminhbg 1y ago
  "Long tail markets" here means small countries with currencies you don't have any particular interest in holding. Starlink sells access in Benin and South Sudan, for example, that's the long tail.
  - quickthrowman 1y ago
    “Avoiding forex risk” is only three words, I hate corporate communications. Why can’t people just say what they mean, sigh.

k__ 1y ago

If it's EVM compatible it's irrelevant that it's focus is on stable coins. People can build their own smart contracts and speculate.

weitendorf 1y ago

Can you explain some of the technical goals of your project and the overall model you're thinking about implementing? You mentioned sub-cent tx fees, 100k tps, and what I presume to be atomic swaps for stablecoins. Are you thinking about something like $0.10 fees or something like $0.0001 fees? At $0.10 fees at 100ktps that end up representing $100/s in tx costs which is about $8.6M/day or $3B/year. Presumably you expect to make more per year on this project in the ideal case, so are you intending to allow the fees or TPS to "float" upward, or to restrict participation in the L1 to only trusted partners, or for the network operators to make money off the interest from holding the stablecoins' currencies in reserve? What if demand exceeds 100k tps? Since this will be a corporate backed project how do you plan to handle sanctions and government currency controls, eg if Uncle Sam tells you to drop support for Iranian currency, how will that work? Will there be account/transaction privacy built into the network through ring cryptography or zk proofs? I'm assuming no, but if your answer is yes and Uncle Sam takes issue with that, what is your plan?

weitendorf 1y ago
Oops, my math was off. I meant $0.001/tx at 100ktps=$100/s=$8.6M/day=$3B/yr

dperfect 1y ago

It sounds great, but every time I see this argument, I end up going down the rabbit hole of actually studying how stablecoins operate. And every time, I come to the same conclusion: they always rely on trust in an off-chain oracle or custodian. At that point, a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent. Bitcoin (and possibly a few others) is one of the few uses of blockchain that actually makes sense. The blockchain serves the currency, and the currency serves the blockchain. The blockchain exists to provide consensus without needing to trust any off-chain entity, but the blockchain relies on computing infrastructure that has real-world costs. The scarcity of Bitcoin (the currency) and arguably-fictitious reward for participation in mining is the incentive for people in the real world to contribute resources required for the blockchain to function. Any real-world value given to Bitcoin is secondary and only a result of the fact that (1) mining infrastructure has a cost, and (2) people who understand the system have realized that, unlike fiat, stablecoins, or 1000 other crypto products, Bitcoin has no reliance on trusted, off-chain entities who could manipulate it. You trust your stablecoin's issuer that they hold enough fiat in reserve to match the coin? You might as well trust your bank, but while you're at it, remind them that they don't have to take days to process a transaction - they could process transactions as fast as (actually faster than) a blockchain. But I imagine most banks would point to regulation as a reason for the delays, and they might be right. So what are stablecoins really trying to do? Circumvent regulation? Implement something the banks just aren't willing to do themselves?

ksk23 1y ago
European Union forced all banks that offer instant-transfers to make them for free starting 26‘ if I remember correctly. That works rather well!
idiotsecant 1y ago
Bitcoin makes the least sense of any of these schemes. Proof of work is just proof of sota ASIC ownership, which is just proof of stake by another name. Why not just use POS like everyone else and avoid dumping the carbon? Bitcoin is going to be one of those things in the history books that will seem utterly incomprehensibly irresponsible to future generations.

AquinasCoder 1y ago

The stripe conference focused more than I would have liked on crypto. I completely understand that there are markets and customers that can find real utility in it, but I wonder how many businesses will really ever benefit from stablecoins. We're in higher education, and potentially our international clients could avoid hiccups with regulation, delays, compliance, and more using stablecoins, but it's really a guess. In the meantime, the pricing model of stripe seems to prioritize bigger and bigger clients. That being said from Stripe's perspective stablecoins an easy bet to make. They win by building payment infrastructure within the traditional payment ecosystem and win by providing an alternative completely outside of it.

asim 1y ago

> Who will run validator nodes? "A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model." I think Zuck tried to do this. It was called Libra or Diem or I can't remember what it ended up being. Ultimately trust is what matters. In the end whether it was regulation or governments or anything else that killed it, it's only going to work if people can trust you. They trusted you with fiat payments, maybe they'll trust you with crypto. The thing to note, you'll win over the US centric crowd but it's unclear if it will translate truly across borders to Europe, Russia, China, etc. I'm guessing that doesn't matter but just remember what happened. Make sure to be honest about who's actually going to run the payment rails here.

jekrb 1y ago
Libra/Diem was told by regulators to not move forward with the project. They were very early days, and trying to "do it right" in which the administration said "not at all". Similar also happened with Visa... check when they were publishing in-depth reports from their crypto arm and then suddenly stopped.
asim 1y ago
Further to my point https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/09/07/stripe-s-tempo-blockchain-is-a-referendum-on-the-ghost-of-libra-says-libra-co-creator https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/09/07/stripe-s-tempo-bl...

ViewTrick1002 1y ago

> We're currently adding stablecoin functionality to the Stripe dashboard, and the first user is an Argentinian bike importer that finds transacting with their suppliers to be challenging. Using crypto to dodge currency controls? Of course I agree that currency controls are bad. But, if the use case for crypto keeps being fostering illegal transactions then it doesn’t solve anything a functioning economy needs.

logicchains 1y ago
>But, if the use case for crypto keeps being fostering illegal transactions then it doesn’t solve anything a functioning economy needs. In many countries what the economy needs to function well includes things that are illegal.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  Which means it will only ever be a tiny niche market since the amounts are irrelevant when the service is needed. Then as the country’s economy develops the need for these illegal services disappear, or quickly gets you in trouble.
  - logicchains 1y ago
    >Then as the country’s economy develops the need for these illegal services disappear, or quickly gets you in trouble. This is not necessarily the case given how large the online illegal drugs market is in pretty much every developed country. Just because weed was legalised, it doesn't mean all other narcotics will be legalised in future too.
    - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
      Which given the busts of Silkroad etc. and countries changing the laws allowing them to search mail making delivery more perilous, has again withdrawn to a physical hands on market. Or do you suggest to send some stable coins when meeting the local dealer?!?!

farco12 1y ago

Patrick, congratulations on launching Tempo. If there was a company where it actually made sense to build and use a blockchain it would be Stripe. The website is a bit painful to read but I thought it provided good general information for potential partners. As as a dev, my questions are why did your team decide to build a new L1 chain instead of an Ethereum L2 and why did you all stick with the EVM architecture instead of looking at something like the MoveVM?

thelittleone 1y ago

Hey Patrick, When your algorithm freezes a legit business's funds, you hold them indefinitely and can invest them for your own profit. The only recourse you offer is mandatory arbitration with an arbitrator Stripe chooses. How is that a fair system?

financetechbro 1y ago
It’s a fair system for stripe!

anonymouse008 1y ago

“The way out of interchange”

xipho 1y ago

If the only two examples that are presented are "SpaceX" and "Latin America" can we not dismiss any further importance on the conflict-of-interest aspect alone? A completely failed experiment, and a company that can create millions simply by tweeting- who buys this?

pluc 1y ago

So Elon Musk and Nayib Bukele. Two solid reasons.

knorker 1y ago

That just sounds like "one clever trick" to not pay taxes, import duties, or follow laws. Or can you explain how these bike importers are being hampered in fiat not by laws, but by technology? Every time I look at this, the "clever trick" is actually law evasion / law avoidance, to borrow a tax term. It's about as "clever" as lying to the IRS to save money on taxes. That was never a loophole.

hitradostava 1y ago

Patrick, the problems you describe (speed, cost, cross-border friction) already have solutions. SEPA Instant, FedNow, PIX, and providers like Wise move money in seconds, at negligible cost, inside regulated systems. Tempo doesn’t solve payments; it sidesteps oversight. By shifting flows onto a private stablecoin ledger, Stripe isn’t fixing inefficiency; it’s making it easier to route money in ways regulators and tax authorities can’t easily monitor. That’s not innovation, it’s the oldest trick in the crypto playbook: pretend you’re improving payments, when what you’re really selling is a way around the rules.

horseradish7k 1y ago
did you write your comment?

resters 1y ago

Makes sense. Stablecoins in the new regulatory landscape offer significant efficiency gains in the provisioning of lots of innovative financial services (and also typical ones). Does Stripe have a perspective on the unique systemic risks that stablecoin exposure might end up having in the new regulatory landscape?

Zigurd 1y ago

That Stripe is involved is probably the best endorsement of Stripe being involved in crypto. Banking in South America is something crypto skeptics have heard for many years now. I was involved in a project that combined crypto with mesh networking. The launch was going to take place in South America. Why? Because university students in Brazil are desperate for a little bit of side hustle money, and incentives could cross borders easily using crypto. This was backed by first tier VC that had a number of crypto investments, including fundamental crypto technologies, alongside other more mundane things. Nobody involved in the project had any intention of creating a bunch of poor student bag holders. Nevertheless, the combination of mesh networking and crypto based incentivization wasn't enough to even turn it into the next Helium (they still around?) SpaceX using crypto? Are any of their customers seriously going to pay using crypto? Are they gonna pay any of their bills using crypto? I'm not trying to piss in your Cheerios. But making real world use cases not die of uselessness is going to be a challenge.

Izikiel43 1y ago

> and the first user is an Argentinian bike importer that finds transacting with their suppliers to be challenging. I'm not surprised, capital controls come and go there, and when they come, they stay for several years.

verdverm 1y ago

Crypto plus doing business with Musk? Not sure you'll win many hearts and minds You could achieve the same things with a proof-of-authority ledger instead of a "stable" coin

spaceman_2020 1y ago

My biggest reason to be a crypto believer right now is stablecoins, international payments, and agentic AI. It's inevitable that agentic AI will handle a lot of workload online eventually. We can't expect these agents to work on existing payment rails, what with their fees and slow settlement and international payment hurdles. AI agents that can pay each other when necessary - even tiny fractional amounts - will be a massive use case.

shomp 1y ago
That can pay each other? For what? Genuinely curious.
- spaceman_2020 1y ago
  I would imagine that eventually you'd want to gate some data. Like you want your AI agent to get the lastest financial data from Bloomberg and Bloomberg charges you $0.01 per query

PKop 1y ago

What about the tax implications of every transaction being a taxable event? Are you tracking all of this for tax purposes? These transactions all have to be reported to the IRS even for stable coins. This is the biggest thing making crypto payments a non-starter. What's the story here from the end-user's perspective? I as an individual have no interest in stacking stable coins if when I spend them to businesses, I have to meticulously track each transaction and report it. Whatever you're doing for businesses doesn't seem like it would solve this problem for individuals, if you're even solving it for businesses themselves that is.

1oooqooq 1y ago

i read this move as "we were skeptics like anyone with a brain, but also now trump allowed stable coins to offer pyramid like incentives and only a fool wouldn't jump on that easy money." https://www.wired.com/story/genius-act-loophole-stablecoins-banks/ https://www.wired.com/story/genius-act-loophole-stablecoins-...

raggi 1y ago

Can you expand on "easier" and "faster" in easier/faster/better. I understand "better" in terms of transparency, shared standards for integration, and various other properties. I can less immediately expand "easier" and "faster". Easier: on chain VMs are far from simple or easy, recovery from mistakes is far more complex. Some other aspects such as the implicit common standard might reduce some amount of need for "green field agreement", and the implicit openness of the protocols avoid some of the traps of "here's a rest api, go", but is this the focus? When you look at a wide variety of the big ticket items in everything that needs doing, is the total set easier? Are there surprises there? Faster: similar to above, this claim is surprising. There's a lot of by-design overhead to a cryptographic ledger system. Lots of things that can be done to make it wider, to reduce latency and increase throughput, but at a fundamental level core operations such as transaction creation require a lot more processing going into a ledger than into a traditional database, even one at scale. Maybe faster here isn't about system faster, but time to product delivery? If so is that common standards? Are there surprises here too, what were they? Edit: I see elsewhere in the thread you provide some answers in a slightly different framing. A potentially unfair paraphrase and summary seems to be that this enabled integrations to bypass expensive incumbents and comparatively poor traditional infrastructure. If that's a reasonable approximation my question is this: what if you dropped good sized chunks of the blockchain part that is the main system bottleneck, but kept the rest of the properties (shared micro computation model, shared transaction model, common API standard and protocol, eradication of foot dragging incumbents etc).?

buildbuildbuild 1y ago
Easier: I can earn or spend real money 24/7 without anyone’s permission, at any age, in any location. Faster: Payments settle lightning fast compared to ACH/Wires, permanently and internationally. Better: I don’t need anyone’s approval to be “banked” and I don’t have to operate in fear of clawbacks. Programs are the ultimate unbanked, and that’s the “agentic economy” that is emerging.
- raggi 1y ago
  Please forgive my pushback but: No third party: Almost certainly as a user there are still third parties involved, this isn't (AFAICS and based on other discussions) a user facing chain (edit: correction, they do say the chain is public, but here I really mean user facing value: you aren't minting stablecoins, you have to get them from somewhere). At "envisioned" transaction rates you would in practice not be syncing the chain and interacting with it yourself in any meaningful way. Settlement: chain settlement is different from financial settlement. Between clearing ends there will still need to be sufficient demonstration of KYC, exchange of some form of actual holdings and so on. Typically the attraction of /to stablecoins is that they're used to perform transactions ahead of movement of actualizable value in target currencies. A possible alternative model is that all invested parties sink actual value into a global sink fund backing the stablecoin that is sufficiently protected to ensure that it does not devalue. In practice organizations almost certainly aren't going to part with wealth on those volumes and will operate secondary private exchange markets and settlement in bulk to escape concerns of short term loss, leverage, inflation and many other dynamics.

smoyer 1y ago

We're starting to seek access to our services using the x402 protocol. It's practical for micro-payments and can facilitate subscriptions and most importantly, completely under the control of the end user. See https://x402.org https://x402.org

0x10ca1h0st 1y ago

Invest in echi coin and then we can talk about your coin! ;)

karlgkk 1y ago

Lazy vibe check, building a stable coin is way easier than running settlement or a clearing house. So I get it I guess! Edit: I’m only joking a little bit

8bitbeep 1y ago

> crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante. It must be ignorance on my part or perhaps I’m just lucky with residency and clients, but I get paid through services like Wise frequently. Taxes are pretty reasonable and I receive the money instantly on my bank account from US, Europe or Latin America. I don’t really know much better it needs to get. I can never understand what problem stablecoins are trying to solve.

crossroadsguy 1y ago

A “stable” coin is as much a “crypto” as is a fast turtle fast.

danielmarkbruce 1y ago

You have basically said "there is a real problem here" and "stablecoins are better than what there was before". Did you look at a non crypto/stablecoin solution to perhaps find something even better for legitimate businesses (and perhaps worse for crooks)?

citizenpaul 1y ago

I'm a crypto disappoin-ic. Seems like humans simply cannot un-shackle themselves from central control no matter how low the bar. The second crypto got steam the scammers, criminals and con artists were on it so fast fly's would be embarrassed by their shameless dive into feces. Long term I'm still more optimistic on crypto than AI. I think part of the problem with crypto is it needs to be around longer than some government money to prove to people it has staying power. Only then will financial people start doing things like recommend a small crypto stash for your retirement just in case. The average person is not going to make the necessary critical mass move into crypto without some sort permission saying its ok and not going to risk all their money or jail time.

keepamovin 1y ago

Does Stripe plan to offer its own variety of coins in future?

3uler 1y ago

This is exactly how you bootstrap payment rails to compete with Visa/MC. Merchants would do anything to reduce the 2-3% they’re bleeding to the card schemes. Everyone focuses on consumer adoption, but merchants push payment methods customers don’t love all the time - ACH transfers, store cards, cash discounts. If stablecoins can cut interchange from 2-3% to near zero, merchants will drive adoption through discounts and incentives. Gas stations where card fees destroy margins, high-volume retailers - get a few major players offering meaningful stablecoin discounts and suddenly consumers have a reason to figure out the wallets.

hiq 1y ago

Quoting https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...: > Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype. In particular, using the term "blockchain"/"crypto" to talk about something more centralized / permissioned than e.g. Bitcoin is missing the point: these systems already existed before. So what do you mean by "crypto" exactly? Distributed systems? I don't think you'll find many distributed systems skeptics on HN.

cogogo 1y ago

> For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. I genuinely do not understand this example. What is spacex actually doing? And why do they even have money in “long tail markets” at all?

kasey_junk 1y ago
I don’t know anything about this specific case but it is common for manufacturers to have currency needs in long tail markets to facilitate payments to subsidiaries, vendors and employees in all the places they do business.

justin66 1y ago

> so it might be interesting to share what changed our mind One can look at Stripe's list of investors...

solarkraft 1y ago

> 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. I still don’t quite understand the point of using crypto then - there’s no advantage in it theoretically being decentalizable since practically it is not. It might as well be an implementation detail. Or are there decentral aspects to how it works? Does it ease auditing? Is it the improved ease of financial/regulatory engineering?

Self-Perfection 1y ago

Why new blockchain? There are already several of them that provide constant low fees and scaling to ~100k tps on L1.

ftmz 1y ago

Fernando from DolarApp here. To add some context: our clients in LatAm use DolarApp to spend internationally with a card at the best rates, send and receive cross-border transfers (not just remittances, but also payroll), and to keep their savings pegged to the dollar. Stablecoins let us deliver a much better user experience and significantly lower fees — in some countries, up to 10x better than incumbents. That said, most of our users don’t care about the underlying infrastructure. They care about the benefits. It’s similar to how someone using a bank card at an ATM doesn’t know (or care) that the system might be running on COBOL. We see it as our job as product people to absorb that complexity so our users get the benefits without having to deal with the complex mechanics behind them. That’s what we believe is helping unlock a platform shift.

lokar 1y ago
Why did this need blockchain? Why could you not use a central private e-money system w/ a good API? It sounds like you think they don't really care about the implementation?
- moreau 1y ago
  Because governments in developing countries won't be able to ban it.

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1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America." https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonmikula_fintech-partner-axiom-bank-na-was-deemed-activity-7253755592882688000-4IVS https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonmikula_fintech-partner-a... When this bank employee expressed skepticism of "DolarApp" he was faced retaliation: https://ia800508.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.flmd.419865/gov.uscourts.flmd.419865.1.0.pdf https://ia800508.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.flmd.4... "10. In and around the spring of 2023, Mr. Ibrahim became uncomfortable with certain practices and activities in which the Bank began to become involved. These included practices that, in Mr. Ibrahims opinion, jeopardized the Banks compliance with anti-money laundering laws, federal safety and soundness requirements for depository institutions, and compliance with specific OCC regulations and requirements that were particularly imperative due to the fact that the Bank was already considered a Troubled Institution 14. Mr. Ibrahim further objected to Axioms initiation of new business programs, without first obtaining non-objection letters from the OCC and without review by the Banks internal New Product Risk Committee, as required by written policies. One such project, DolarApp, was of particular concern to Mr. Ibrahim as it entailed cross-border movement of funds, which triggered significant concerns as to whether the Banks BSA/AML controls are sufficient, among other things. 15. But when Ibrahim raised these concerns with the CEO, Ross Breunig, he told Ibrahim to the effect that he did not want to hear it and shut down the conversation. 18. Almost immediately after Mr. Ibrahim objected to these practices, Axiom and Mr. Breunig began a pattern of retaliation. After the April 2023 leadership meeting where Mr. Ibrahim raised concerns relating to CSI and the DolarApp, Mr. Breunig began canceling Executive Board of Director meetings that Mr. Ibrahim attended. 19. Following a leadership meeting in May 2023, where again Mr. Ibrahim raised concerns about CSI, DolarApp and the overdraft positions, Mr. Ibrahim began receiving email cancellations to multiple committees and Board meetings. 20. Upon inquiry, Mr. Ibrahim learned the meetings were not being canceled, but rather he was being uninvited without explanation. Mr. Breunigs hostility with Mr. Ibrahim also became noticeably apparent during this time." Of course Stripe, Inc. is neither a Troubled Bank nor an untroubled one Anyway, it sounds like DolarApp could be useful for evading anti-money laundering and bank secrecy laws "Importantly, none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit." That's only one of the many reasons people might be skeptical of crypto. See above "They're performing real-world financial activity, and they've found that crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante." How much of this "real world financial activity" is not criminally culpable 100% no doubt

topranks 1y ago

Isn’t the advantage of Stablecoins just that you can avoid regulation when it comes to payments, especially across borders? Otherwise why not just use normal digital payments? I fail to see why a blockchain is needed to log the transactions.

bryan2 1y ago

What is the benefit over cash? I’ve heard stable coins are beneficial for the owners of the coin because it’s basically an interest free loan to the token owner.

camgunz 1y ago

"Trump isn't pursuing financial crimes on blockchains, so we're cashing in as quickly as possible"

lopezvicky7649 1y ago

[dead]

lopezvicky7649 1y ago

[dead]