The Tempo blockchain that Stripe constructed to outperform Bitcoin’s capability of 5 transactions per second (TPS) is publishing lower than three.
Seven months in the past, Stripe pitched its new blockchain on the premise that present blockchains had inadequate capability for its institutional fee flows.
Bitcoin (BTC) miners have added about 160 million transactions over the previous 12 months, averaging 5.1 TPS, a quantity that Tempo’s capability would dwarf, CEO Patrick Collison claimed in September.
Collison additionally bragged that Tempo would have capability for 10,000 TPS, levitating Tempo’s theoretical future excessive above Bitcoin.
Sadly, there at the moment are real-world numbers to settle theoretical capacities with on-chain transactions.
Tempo’s precise utilization per Token Terminal and the corporate’s personal Dune analytics is roughly 2.5 TPS.
Bitcoin publishes 5 TPS.
The underperforming blockchain raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in October 2025 from Thrive Capital, GreenOaks, Sequoia, Ribbit, and SV Angel. Its mainnet went stay on March 18.
Paradigm, along with Stripe, helped develop Tempo. In reality, Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang runs Tempo as its CEO.
The numbers after 5 weeks
Now 5 weeks into mainnet operation, Tempo reported roughly 5,600 day by day lively customers. The chain generated a whopping $205 in charges over 24 hours and held $3 million value of crypto in complete worth locked.
Ethereum, in distinction, generated $1.4 million in charges and $45 billion in complete worth locked.
Tempo’s on-chain decline is seen all over the place on its dashboards.
- Every day new wallets utilizing Tempo peaked at 7,629 on March 19, 2026, and sat at simply 1,749 as of April 21, a 77% drop.
- Every day contract deployments peaked at 3,060 on April 14 and fell to 863 every week later, down 72%.
- Every day token switch quantity peaked above $9 million on March 17, and it now runs two-thirds much less.
- Tempo’s stablecoin DEX cleared simply $56,000 in 24-hour quantity on Tuesday, a determine 95% beneath its peak and fewer than 0.001% of world DEX volumes. Tempo’s DEX would want a ten thousandth decimal level to register a single pure quantity.
- Tempo’s day by day DEX trades sum to lower than 2,000 as of late, down 77% from the March 20 peak above 18,000. Every day DEX quantity on Tempo peaked at $1.1 million and has fallen 93% since.
