Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

I hope so, one of the most annoying leaks in my personal finance workflow is that I have to use a specific site to bridge between USD and USDC - if I could just send USDC directly from my mercury personal account, that would make life much easier.

So like 11 years ago, Stripe made investments into Stellar, which was supposed to be a payment network that would facilitate transactions into existing currencies. I think that hasn't really gone where it was hoped?

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/stripe-takes-...

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.

Nice, lie back and let someone else claim it.

This is off-topic to their grand blockchain adventures, but I need to mention it:

I would love for stripe to start paying appropriate VAT on transactions between their merchants and EU citizens, I've been on their ass about it for nearly a year now. I've reported multiple merchants to them which simply refused to provide an VAT invoice for any transactions. Legally, merchants outside EU are required to pay VAT on their B2C transactions if their EU transaction volume goes above a certain limit, and provide VAT invoice for B2B transactions (but with 0% VAT because it is B2B).

But unfortunately Stripe doesn't seem to have the technology to do a SUM(*) in their database, or check if an email address ends in '.de' or '.it' when they take the payment. So they simply do not give a damn if their merchants provide an invoice with the transaction or not.

Oftentimes it was the problem to actually get an invoice document which has company name, company registration number, street address, city, and tax ID. Extremely basic information which is required on all EU invoices. Many times I have submitted invoices from Stripe merchants to my tax accountant and my tax accountant told me that those are not proper invoices and to please reach out to the merchant to get EU-legal invoices.

Stripe has the technological capabilities to implement proper compliance checks, but they choose to let their merchants send you rubbish self-made PDF invoices with a big red "paid" stamp without any information or "official" Stripe invoices with total fantasy names and fantasy company information. You never know if your merchant is sitting in an embargoed country or is just some schmuck from San Francisco trying to hide their ties to a website.

If other HN users from the EU have been fighting Stripe to get EU-compliant VAT invoices for their B2B or B2C purchases, please feel free to reach out. I've been doing a big stink about this and to me it feels like a deliberate pattern of enabling their merchants to ignore EU VAT obligations.

It's really sad that my extremely positive impression of Stripe has been deeply tainted by this kind of experience across various purchases and subscriptions with Stripe merchants. I had to spend so much time pleading with them to provide proper invoices.