Tempo blockchain built by Stripe to outperform Bitcoin at 5 transactions per second (TPS) We have published fewer than three.
Seven months ago, Stripe pitched a new blockchain on the premise that existing blockchains lacked sufficient capacity for institutional payment flows.
Bitcoin (BTC) miners have added about 160 million transactions over the past 12 months, averaging 5.1 TPS, but CEO Patrick Collison claimed in September that this number would be dwarfed by Tempo’s processing power.
Collison also boasted that Tempo has 10,000 TPS of capacity, touting Tempo’s theoretical prospects higher than Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, realistic numbers now exist to resolve the theoretical capacity of on-chain transactions.
Actual usage per Tempo’s token terminal and its proprietary Dune analysis is approximately 2.5 TPS.
Bitcoin issues 5 TPS.
The underperforming blockchain raised $500 million in October 2025 from Thrive Capital, GreenOaks, Sequoia, Ribbit, and SV Angel at a $5 billion valuation. Its mainnet went live on March 18th.
In addition to Stripe, Paradigm also helped develop Tempo. In fact, Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang runs Tempo as CEO.
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Numbers after 5 weeks
Now, five weeks into mainnet operations, Tempo is reporting approximately 5,600 daily active users. The chain racked up a whopping $205 in fees in 24 hours and kept a total of $3 million worth of cryptocurrencies locked up.
In comparison, Ethereum generated $1.4 million in fees and $45 billion in total locked value.
Tempo’s on-chain decline is visible all over the dashboard.
- Daily new wallets using Tempo peaked at 7,629 on March 19, 2026, but as of April 21, it was only 1,749, a 77% decrease.
- Daily contract adoptions peaked at 3,060 on April 14, but dropped by 72% to 863 a week later.
- Daily token transfers peaked at more than $9 million on March 17, but have now fallen by two-thirds.
- Tempo’s stablecoin DEX cleared just $56,000 in 24-hour trading volume on Tuesday, which is 95% below its peak and less than 0.001% of global DEX trading volume. Tempo’s DEX requires 1/10,000th of a decimal place to register a single natural number.
- Tempo’s recent total daily DEX trades were less than 2,000, down 77% from its March 20 peak of over 18,000. Daily DEX volume on Tempo peaked at $1.1 million, but has since declined by 93%.
