Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#861

Post by chrchr » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

devmor wrote: post #467

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…

Neither Uber nor AirBnB got anyone’s “act in order”. Uber just captured wealth via operating at a loss until competition was absorbed or destroyed. AirBnB just helped further drive up the prices of single family homes and didn’t really have much effect on the hospitality industry at all - it caused a minor observable loss in profit which ultimately resulted in nothing.

Outside of maybe NYC, taxi service in the U.S. was totally unreliable before Uber/Lyft. It's not even a matter of price. It's so much easier to get a ride now in most of the country.

I don't think AirB&B really improved hotels, but it did organize and centralize the "vacation rental" market, making it easier to, for example, rent a beach cottage for the weekend.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#862

Post by flakeoil » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

ralfhn wrote: post #621

j2kun wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Using Wise within Europe, also between non-Euro currencies/countries takes less than 4-8 hours most of the time.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#863

Post by DrammBA » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

mynameisash wrote: post #706

ralfhn wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wired approximately that much money internationally years ago with Wise (then known as TransferWise). Wasn't a hassle at all, didn't require any rigamarole, and importantly, didn't require crypto. What's the problem with using Wise?

> What's the problem with using Wise?

On march 16th 2022 I sent $500 to my cousin in the USA, the transaction was completed on may 2nd 2022 after 9 back and forth emails with support. The first email on march 16th was asking me to confirm some information which I did same day, the other 8 back and forth emails was me asking when was my transaction going to be completed... at that time I had been an active wise user for 3 years...

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#864

Post by solarkraft » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:41 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…

> 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.

I still don’t quite understand the point of using crypto then - there’s no advantage in it theoretically being decentalizable since practically it is not. It might as well be an implementation detail.

Or are there decentral aspects to how it works? Does it ease auditing? Is it the improved ease of financial/regulatory engineering?

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#865

Post by utyop22 » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:42 PM UTC

6r17 wrote: post #530

I worked in crypto space for about 2 years ; and even tough we had great use of the crypto-system for our community ; it ended up being a large cost that we could have yielded better with something else - and it was not because specifically "crypto" - but because ultimately the engineering costs of a generic purpose chain are replicated to all child-chains. So you end up with drastic cost for something that would hav…

My feeling is many people want to see change but they forget that ultimately economics is what matters.

If you can't make it economically viable, it shouldn't exist. Pure and simple.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#866

Post by ericpauley » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

Anon84 wrote: post #794

gamblor956 wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stablecoins will end subject to just as much regulation as a normal bank, maybe even more. JPMorgan Chase, BofA, and their ilk have R&D budgets large enough to have already launched a dozen stablecoins by now. They haven't, not because they can't (on a technical level) but because they don't actually see the value to it (on a business level). They're simply paying lip service to crypto because it pumps up share value…

Banks are already using stable coins internally (case in point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPM_Coin ) it just hasn’t been made available externally yet.

Clicking just a few links down on that article shows that JPM Coin is a Blockchain in branding only. It's backed by a centralized (in trust principals if not in compute) ledger and used for transactions between mutually-trusting parties.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#867

Post by epinephrinios » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

xpl wrote: post #155

Why not use actual Ethereum as a base layer? If you want speed, build (or use) an L2 on top of it. I can hardly see any value in "yet another private blockchain" — just use a database, duh.

Greed. There's no technical basis. I am pretty sure they considered it and even though L2s do not pay much rent to L1, Stripe wanted absolute control (which goes against decentralization) and all the fees in their pocket. Just hoping this doesn't become another trend.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#868

Post by solarkraft » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:48 PM UTC

> The blockchain will be secured by an independent and diverse validator set, with a roadmap toward permissionless validators

This sounds like a „private blockchain“, which loses a lot of the advantages to me, but, if designed correctly, it may still produce a very solid and long living platform if there are many parties interested in keeping it running.

Do consider me skeptical that Stripe will actually cede enough control for this advantage to materialize since that’s just not what companies are incentivized to do.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#869

Post by nlitened » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:51 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #836

So if one ignores the liability/regulation part of this stunt, and just look at the technical merit. Could you then say that this blockchain really provides nothing that a traditional centralized system wouldn't? But at much higher complexity and cost? Wouldn't that just mean that the whole schtick is to avoid regulation? If I as a regulator saw this, I'd just schedule it for my next meeting, since you want to avoid…

> Could you then say that this blockchain really provides nothing that a traditional centralized system wouldn't?

Blockchains (in general) enforce not only open code, but open data.

Technically, nothing prevents traditional banks to offer standardized easy-to-use and easy-to-onboard API access to their financial data, but in reality incentives are not there (quite the opposite).

Blockchains are a contrived way to enforce open code and open data. There are other technical ways to do that, but none of them has been found to actually work in reality.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#870

Post by utyop22 » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

worik wrote: post #655

Money, and the financial system, run on trust. Money can be viewed as a web of trust. There is no technological replacement for trust. To think otherwise is a bit daft.

Ah finally someone who gets it lol.

All financial instruments are expressions of trust / promises or more informally known as IOU's.

I'm yet to see someone do a thorough economic analysis of how all this blockchain stuff will positive impact this.

I have no bias - please bring me well formed arguments. I want to see them!