Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#511

Post by mondrian » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:00 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #333

mondrian wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GENIUS act enables tech companies to become reserve holders -- buy US Treasuries with customers' money. Stripe offers a "transactional ecosystem" to the customer in stablecoins, the customer gives USD to Stripe in exchange for stablecoins, Stripe buys short-term Treasuries and makes a shitload of money on interest. Part of the very high level play is the US Govt seeks to diversify away from depending on nation st…

So then by using this product you are de facto buying short term US debt lowering the debt costs in a way? Is that what you are describing? And Stripe makes money on that short term carry.

Yeah. Stablecoins create demand for Treasuries which drives the price of Treasuries up and interest rate down. So this pressure lowers debt servicing cost for the US government, and Stripe is the holder of those Treasuries and gets paid interest.

This would also serve to counter the drop in global Treasury demand due to recent tariff stuff where presumably our traditional debt holders are losing appetite for US debt...

It also creates a kind of strange situation where stablecoins are basically spendable "Treasury tokens". So you give 1 USD to Uncle Sam (via a middle man like Stripe), get back 1 stablecoin. Then you go and spend the stablecoin, and Uncle Sam goes and spends the USD. It's like a weird double spend situation. Prior to stablecoins, you buy a treasury bill with USD, you hold this unspendable treasury bill while Uncle Sam gets USD to spend.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#512

Post by jacobr1 » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #255

siddthesquid wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the technology of blockchain is irrelevant. If something can be accomplished on the blockchain, which requires N nodes, a business can probably replicate that same objective with less than N nodes because they don't have to pay the cost of verifying that nodes are acting honestly. This business is incentivized to be honest because otherwise they lose their business. Someone has to pay those costs for the N no…

Is this just for dilution of responsibility? If a central company is responsible for these transactions, then they are responsible for the transactions, which means there are all kinds of legal constraints and repercussions. But if it's a blockchain, then all of the nodes in the network are responsible. So in this case, "this business is incentivized to be honest" might be the precise "problem" this is meant to solve…

Or further, that you need to interact with a business at all. Visa does a good job intermediating many classes of payment. But I am limited in what kind of applications I can build on top of that (tied directly into the payment)

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#513

Post by dcposch » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #425

pc wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that imply that some day users would be able to pay using Tempo? I don't think that customers or businesses should see Tempo very much. In the success case, Tempo is a platform like SWIFT or ACH that others employ behind the scenes to orchestrate transactions. "Decentralized, internet-scale SWIFT" isn't exactly the right analogy (there are clearly lots of differences), but it's not totally wrong either. Why are…

> Instant on-chain transfers avoiding trapped liquidity. If you're transferring money from financial institution A to institution B, and the transfer takes a day, you're either slowed a day in taking the next step or you have to somehow cover that float. These are slow by design - abuse/fraud. How does blockchain solve that issue? > * Fees that are lower than cards. Card payments are instant, which is often valuable…

> Once again - this is a feature not a bug

Are you really "once again"ing Patrick Collison on the issue of how payments work?

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#514

Post by cycomanic » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:02 PM UTC

skritched wrote: post #457

madamelic wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think US banking needs something an Uber or AirBnB style shake-up to get their act in order. It's awful how behind the times the US is when it comes to banking. 2 - 3 days to get money from one account to another is beyond embarrassing in the modern day. It took the US something like 15 years to get chip-and-pin. Banks are still these monolithic entities that don't care to innovate or listen to customer…

What other countries are you comparing to? I did a multi year assignment in Germany and holy fucking hell does their banking system suck. It took weeks for my checks to be deposited and reconciliation times were longer. Not defending the US here by my only non-US banking experience was atrocious.

The question is why did you use cheques? I don't know anyone who is not American who has used cheques in the last 20 years or so. I have not been living in Germany in a long time so I can't talk much about the banking system, but I have had transfers with German friends and family which never took more than maybe a day or 2 within Europe.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#515

Post by FridgeSeal » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:03 PM UTC

smoovb wrote: post #361

udev4096 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. The biggest stable coin, Tether, is pure scam. They are essentially creating money out of nowhere. They were found guilty of massive fraud and were fined $18M [1]. They refuse to get audited by a third-party [2]. The ones that do audit them are just as sketchy as them [3]. I would recommend watching this video to grasp the scope of their fraud [4] [1] - https://coingeek.com/tether-bitfinex-prohibited-from-o…

Counterpoint. Tether has grown into one of the most profitable, well funded companies on the planet. Their past growing pains are irrelevant to where they are now. They make $30-50 million per day with just 200 employees. They are the 18th largest holder of US debt, ahead of UAE and Germany. Last year, Tether achieved $14 billion in profit, surpassing Pfizer, Tesla, and BlackRock. https://www.bitget.com/news/detail/1…

Your argument is “ah yes, it’s a scam, but look how much money it makes”

That doesn’t make it…less of a scam. I bet drug kingpins make bank too, doesn’t make them any more valid.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#516

Post by onesociety2022 » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:05 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #400

dcposch wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Uber works much better than taxis (once upon a time, people could "call a dispatcher" an hour in advance, wait on hold, etc) Uber rides ARE taxis. The innovation of Uber wasn't done by Uber it was done by everyone having a GPS enabled always connected phone and computing device in their hand at all times.

Uber isn't just taxis - if a bunch of taxi companies just got together and developed a taxi ordering app that looks just like Uber, it still won't be Uber.

Uber is a whole bunch of things combined:

- very intuitive taxi ordering UX (for riders) and dispatching UX (for drivers).

- circumventing regulation so there are no more artificial limits on taxi supply in a given city.

- enabling gig economy: because you can use your own personal vehicle, you can work anytime you want for however long you want. You don't need to lease a taxi for an entire week or an entire month. You can choose to work for 4 hours on a weekend only during surge times if you wanted to. So it allows supply to be elastic to meet demand while also offering flexible work arrangements for part-time drivers.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#517

Post by yunohn » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:05 PM UTC

It’s important to distinguish that these kinds of announcements are only confirmations of the underlying value/potential of limited parts of crypto tech. But NOT a celebration of crypto coins, even though resulting market and Twitter activity would have us believe otherwise. It’s not like stripe is buying specific coins…

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#518

Post by knorker » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:05 PM UTC

pc wrote: post #46

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…

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.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#519

Post by wazdra » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:05 PM UTC

forgotTheLast wrote: post #498

taberiand wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That term has a very specific meaning and I wish people stopped using it to mean "big tech doing something bad"

Well, doesn't that specific meaning apply here? I mean, the lack of protection for end-users is at first compensated by investment money (low prices and huge effort on support). Once network effect is reached, the unregulated nature of the platform shows, end-users are wronged, only providers profit from the lack of regulation ...

Or maybe I don't understand the meaning of enshittification?

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#520

Post by quickthrowman » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:06 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #227

pc wrote: post #46

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…

> 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.

Yeah, I’d like clarification on what SpaceX is doing, ‘managing money in long tail markets’ is essentially meaningless.