Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

I'll attempt an answer:

Today, if you want to transact between businesses or retail (folks like you and I), you need to find a route between the two entities' banks. This route might take several hops, passing through some central banks, and some of these hops might be instant or might take days to actually settle. On top of that, you need to pay the service that helped you find a route (SWIFT) and potentially the nodes your transaction goes through. Bottomline, it can be slow and a lot of middle men are taxing you.

This is why you see services like (Transfer)Wise, that basically try to bank everywhere, and allow you to send money faster by taking a shorter route (kind of like a wormhole :D). But they have to add liquidity everywhere, which they have to rebalance constantly, and it's centralized (single point of failure). FWIW it's great because for a long time this is the best thing we had.

Now, let's take a look at the other side. Using stablecoin is a matter of just creating a wallet. The openness by default of blockchains make it really easy to integrate with a blockchain as an entity (just use the SDK, it's there by design). Furthermore, it's in many cases instant and cheap (unless you're transacting on a slow blockchain, but then that's your fault).

That being said, the elephant in the room is that one stablecoin (let's say USDC) is now present on many blockchains. So if you have USDC on chain A, and I have USDC on chain B, we're back to our "tradfi" world where we have to find a route between our two chains, which might take us over many bridges, which can be slow and costly. The alternative, like with Wise, is to use centralized players who have liquidity on many different chains and can move things around by just updating their internal (and centralized) database. It's tradfi all over again :D

Probably his history manipulating crypto markets specifically

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).

Stellar was my first thought too. I predicted it would take over the low-value transaction / fintech crypto space with their fast transaction times, low fees, spam protection, and bank buy-in but it just went nowhere. sigh

You don’t need to shut down the actual blockchain network participants to kill it for your citizens.