Stripe and Circle are building their blockchain. Bullish went public. Kraken launched its payment product. Across Bullish, Stripe, Circle, Coinbase and Kraken one pattern stands out: centralized digital asset companies are maturing faster and more aggressively than open protocols.
This 12-18 month window post-GENIUS Act is when the winners will lock in their position.
BTC remains the only digital asset with a macro thesis. Everything else will get priced as infrastructure.
We’ve seen this movie before in cloud, mobile and AI.
The same is now happening in crypto.
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Stripe goes all in on crypto to build its own blockchain. Its unannounced “Tempo” chain is a payments-focused Layer-1. Paired with its stablecoin startup (Bridge) and wallet infra (Privy), Stripe could control both issuance and the last mile of payments. [NEWS] [ANALYSIS]
So what? If Tempo works, Stripe could route every USD stablecoin payment through its own chain. This means: cutting costs, keeping the data, and locking in the merchants. Earlier this year, Stripe launched stablecoin accounts for businesses in 100+ countries. It also powers stablecoin payments for Shopify’s entire merchant base. With all these moves, it is rebuilding the payments stack for the next decade.
