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Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

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Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#621

Post by ralfhn »

j2kun wrote: post #280
apinstein wrote: post #151

Here's the play. It's very simple, and it's quite good. Stripe processes a LOT of money. The customers that get that money need to move it around. Often to banks. Stripe makes no money on that. Over the last few years, stablecoins have become a preferred means to hold and move money (for convenience, etc). Stablecoin providers make money on their float -- selling stablecoins means you get free deposits, and risk-free…

> Over the last few years, stablecoins have become a preferred means to hold and move money (for convenience, etc). For avoiding regulation.

My online bank doesn’t support international wire transfers. I had to wire money to a local bank then go to the branch in person, twice, to wire money to my own brother in Europe. He then had to schedule an appointment with his own bank, go in person, and justify why he received such a big transfer, mind you, it was 8k…

So yeah, it’s not about regulation. If crypto can help streamline all this, it’s a net positive

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#622

Post by woah »

flyer23 wrote: post #443
woah wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can an invoice "not be legal" if it records a transaction? Sounds like your jurisdiction is requiring superfluous formatting rules, but I don't see how that's anyone's problem except for yours. You're trying to get Stripe to force merchants to conform to some arbitrary document format for an invoice that isn't even part of Stripe's transaction flow, based on a regex on emails for certain TLDs?? Is Stripe the worl…

You call a pdf,converted from google sheet, with some random number, product name and price an invoice? This is kids scamming on taxes, they do not want to be catched and Stripe do not care as long as they get paid they share. That is whole US lately, fck regulations and make money.

In the US, you are required to pay taxes on your income. If the IRS takes an interest in you and you are not able to prove in court that you properly paid taxes on the income you turned into your assets, they will take all your money.

None of this has anything to do with the format of any invoices. If you wrote a receipt on a piece of toilet paper, that's fine as long as you can prove that you then sent 30-50% of the money you received to the US government. I believe this is more generally a feature of common law legal systems which prioritize honest intentions over box-checking.

Whatever other requirements exist in other countries are not really a US business's concern, unless those countries start turning their merchandise away at the border. In any case, expecting a random payment processor to act as world paperwork policeman for the EU is hilariously ridiculous.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#625

Post by nl »

elteto wrote: post #553
graeme wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can absolutely do that with stablecoins. Why couldn't you?

How would the “out of thin air” value creation work in a blockchain ledger? Pardon my very naive understanding of both subjects.

It depends on the stablecoin mechanism.

Algorithmic stablecoins[1] don't have a one-for-one backing in real world assets so can in theory create new coins "from thin air". The amount they can do this depends on the exact algorithm and the backing assets, and the practicalities of unstable crypto pricing make this difficult in practice.

For example the well-known DAI stablecoin[2] is backed by a mix of crypto assets, but is overcollateralized to avoid problems when one of the backing assets drops in value. The is sort of the opposite of "creating money out of thin air"...

Non-algorithmic stablecoins can do it by being backed by "high quality loan assets", in which case the conventional, non-crypto credit creation mechanism applies.

[1] https://www.kraken.com/learn/algorithmic-stablecoins

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_(cryptocurrency)

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#626

Post by latchkey »

degamad wrote: post #600
latchkey wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small money is fine. Any big transaction will get flagged and potentially delayed. I don't know about you, but I'd rather use a system that allows me to do what I want with my funds without anyone else controlling it.

> I don't know about you, but I'd rather use a system that allows me to do what I want with my funds without anyone else controlling it. How do we know that this unusual transaction is you doing what you want and not someone else controlling and defrauding you? A small well-understood amount of friction that significantly reduces everyone's risk is not an attempt to control your funds. Old systems with arbitrary dela…

> How do we know that this unusual transaction is you doing what you want and not someone else controlling and defrauding you?

That's what they'd like you to believe, but fact of the matter is that you're still not protected. For example, at my last company, the finance department was phished into changing a bank account number and transferred $50k to another account. Bank just shrugged.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#627

Post by ec109685 »

matthewmueller wrote: post #539
simonw wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say more about the SpaceX use-case? Are they paying for rocket parts from some of their vendors using crypto?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/31/stablecoins-are-finding-pr...

Why can’t bridge just convert the money into USD? What’s the point of the stable coins step?

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#628

Post by siddthesquid »

baby wrote: post #569
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…

You are missing the "trust" element of a blockchain. A blockchain essentially allows you to run a distributed database where the different actors don't trust one another. Tradfi is built on trust of entities (can I trust this bank? Can I trust this central bank? Etc.)

Yes, that trust is the fundamental difference. However, that trust costs money in the form of needing more nodes.

You usually can trust your bank, as long as you trust your government. Regulations make it difficult for banks to misbehave.

That being said, not trusting your government (which I can believe is a valid stance in some countries) is probably the only valid use case for blockchain IMO.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#629

Post by saulpw »

nathan_compton wrote: post #236
solumos wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can transfer stablecoins to an end-user without taking custody of it, and that end-user can redeem it in their local market without the local + US-based bank having to talk. It’s faster and cheaper. Stablecoins are a sort of “glue” between global banking infrastructure that otherwise would be difficult to set up as a provider (due to regulation), slow (due to bank technology for global payments being slow…

> due to regulation If the goal here is to overcome regulation isn't all this threatened by the possibility of new regulation that recaptures this behavior?

Eventually. But there's a period of time until that's the case, which makes it worthwhile. Kind of a regulatory arbitrage in time.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#630

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

dperfect wrote: post #348
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…

It sounds great, but every time I see this argument, I end up going down the rabbit hole of actually studying how stablecoins operate. And every time, I come to the same conclusion: they always rely on trust in an off-chain oracle or custodian. At that point, a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent. Bitcoin (and possibly a few others) is one of…

"they don't have to take days to process a transaction" Unlike blockchains, banks are required to check the tx validity against fraud, money laundering, sanction lists, terrorist financing etc, must ensure funds could be returned if a mistake was made. They could not be processed on weekend or at night, because some transactions require manual review by human workers.
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