Tempo Goes Live: Can Stripe’s Blockchain Own the Payment Rails? | Roundup

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It's hard in the age of AI to just judge a project on its merits when it comes to tech, but it's very clear right now, at least for me. It just hit mainet today, but like the Tempo's tech at the moment at least is the best in market. This episode is sponsored by Canton, the only public permissionless blockchain built for institutional finance. We'll hear more from Canton later in the episode. Blockworks digital asset summit is back in New York March 24th through 26th. We'll have top speakers from leading asset managers, financial institutions, DeFi protocols, crypto companies, and policy makers all under one roof. Think Black Rockck, Coinbase, Robin Hood, and more. Follow the link in today's show notes to buy tickets, and make sure to use code bell 200 for $200 off at

checkout. See you there. Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the companies, funds or projects discussed. All right, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Bell Curve. You got me, Zave, Miles. Fellas, welcome. >> Hello. >> Z, you are not jetlagged. Just remember on this episode you are not feeling >> uh I've touched down in Europe from Australia yesterday and I'm recording this late evening European time so I'm

trying not to think about what time that is in Australia. So [laughter] looking forward to this one. >> Do you not think though sometimes your body just gets so confused if you move around enough it's just like screw it? >> I I do think so. I feel like when you travel a fair bit as well there are some little tips and tricks you can get around and just the the everyday excitement of being in a new location. So, and everyday excitement of being on another Bela podcast as well. [laughter] >> Exactly. Well, the real excitement is coming in tminus, we're t-minus 6 days out from DS. I was just telling you guys, I mean, it's kind of interesting, a weird Everyone's got their own little look at the industry and they've got own little sources of alpha and data points.

I will say this is something we've been talking about on Twitter, but it's actually true. The institutional bull market thing is just very real. I mean, we've been hosting D since 2019. I've watched twice the attendance of of DAS fall like 50 to 70% year-over-year in these bare market cycles. So, we have this whole preparation that we do. We're this is going to be the biggest ass we've ever had in a real crypto bare market and it just I think this is uh you know we opened things up last year. You know, we talked about this divergence and it just is continuously happening. Um, and also it's just it is funny for me to watch simultaneously what's going on with DS and the energy and the excitement and the attention and

like the names that are there this year. It's crazy. At the same time as we have this Vanity Fair article about being demanded to be taken seriously and I I don't even know what to make of it fully. It was just, you know, it's one of those data points that you just see these two things and it's like, okay, we're at the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, you know. Um, that was my take >> 100%. Um, at the same time, I did still see Fartcoin on the attendee list. Uh, right right above Federal Reserve of the United States, Fidelity. Uh, it's like >> we got to have the good folks of Farcon represented. Miles, come on.

>> You have to 100%. >> We don't need to grow up too fast. >> Shout out to whoever put that company in the attendee list. Um, so yeah, we're still like we're still weird. Um, we're just Yeah, it's it's okay. It's it's a little bit more buttoned up and the tokens are still down, but the charts are up and to the right. >> Uh, including D's attendee list. >> I feel I feel like I feel pretty good about saying I mean, not a trader, not a professional investor, ignore what I'm about to say. But it feels like my spidey sense is that there's a bottom in asset prices even though I think it there will be some amount of time to like there's kind of a general momentum

new investment you know ac like sentiment thing that takes a while longer to turn around. I don't think we've turned the corner on that yet but there's been Yeah, man. There are all these just signs of Yeah. people like we're talking about a crypto the family office of a prominent crypto founder who's taking crypto off of their you know it's like hey if you consider that that's probably the only thing you guys have edge in you know [laughter] like why you know I I just there are all these signs I think that >> yeah but isn't that success right we're fading into the background of other industries technically right um it's it's you could be investing in AI that leverages crypto um it's you know two or

three years ago they might have presented themselves as a crypto play but now they're like an agent microp payment play right and we'll talk about that on this episode um and fintech is the same thing right um and I think that that overall is a good thing it just means that we're now actually providing solutions for the rest of the world that doesn't need its own standalone category um but it's a bit sad because that was a fun crazy time you know what though I I'm kind of torn in terms of how I feel about this and it not to get too philosophical but it kind of begs the question what is an industry and you know if you think about there are still like tech conferences right there's there's no such thing there used to be internet conferences but if I were to say tech that means something specific

right it's the so there are many different parts of tech there's like defense SAS e-commerce sure there are their own individual conferences but if I were to say to you tech and who are the leaders you'd be thinking Bezos Beni off Zuckerberg you know now uh, you know, Sam Alman, Elon Musk, even though they've dispersed into different verticals, there's a cultural framework and the world's not that big. So, I would imagine, you know, when you talk about crypto, I mean, the we're not at a space anymore where you can be an expert in everything. like the nuance at this point of the people that are working on the financial side of crypto is so deep that there's not a ton that you have in common anymore with the infrerds you know that are building on the me side of things like kind of the lending you know

dex market micro structure stable coin banking payments they're all dispersing but I would still argue and I think permanently there's going to be a cultural holding together of that if for no other reason than the people that are going to be successful in in each of the individual vert verticals have all grown up in crypto and they'll know each other and there's a social fabric that ties it all together. >> Yeah. I mean, I was saying in an Uber tonight like I think crypto has won like I mean I think all of us admit that as well. Uh if someone told me back in 2019 when I first came into the industry like you know bright starry eyed that like you know the banks are going to use crypto and uh like they don't know what they're doing right now. or you're

seeing that happen 6 years later and I think everyone should congratulate themselves for getting the industry to where it's at already. Like it's been a massive achievement and I think you know unfortunately right now the sentiment is negative to some extent because I think maybe uh the ownership to some of the people who helped get the industry to where it is today um in terms of like equity and or tokens etc and just general value maybe isn't as high as what they once anticipated all those years ago. But I do think in terms of like especially what we'll talk about on today's podcast which is of course tempo blockchain uh if you think about like tempo blockchain being launched a few years ago all the partners open AI like everything like that was just

unimaginable five six years ago so I think it's happening now uh like this is fantastic what you guys were saying as well also agree like crypto as a technology is being abstracted I mean I studied financial technology and blockchain was one part of financial technology and AI was the other like I I think events like DAS even itself is just like you know a financial technology event and maybe there's some AI teams there as well in future etc. So it's great to see where crypto is at right now. I think there's still a long way to go. I think there's still a lot of value out there for taking for for both enterprises, businesses and retail and whoever you are in the space. So yeah, I'm excited tonight to crack into to Tempo the the most recent corp chain which was just announced on mainet

today. And yeah, excited to to dig in. Is it fair to say no one's tried it six years ago or is that like Libra is what comes to mind? Right. Um we can get into like if there, you know, is this a timing thing? Libra was right, just wasn't the wrong time, misaligned incentives. We'll get into it. Before you respond, uh I realized we haven't set the tone for this whole episode. So guys, we did a last episode, in case you missed it, we did a bull bear on Hyperlid, which was a ton of fun. Um got really good response. So, we're actually going to we're moving to we actually got the timing pretty lucky on this. Tempo unveiled its mainet today and we're doing a bull verse bear case on Tempo.

So, uh yeah, I thought it could be fun. I mean, Zeve, um you're kind of our resident tempo expert bull. If you could introduce, you know, the idea of tempo and then I would love to get into the history as well. Like I would I Miles I think that's a super interesting comparison to Libra. And maybe we can echo some of the second mover timing advantages that came through in the hyperlquid bullc case into the uh into the tempo b case too. >> Yeah, for sure. Let's do it. Um yeah, so so tempo as Mike just mentioned was announced on mainet today. Very coincidental because we came up for the topic for the podcast a week ago. So perfect timing for us. um really simply you know what tempo is for those who

don't know it's a payment specific layer 1 blockchain uh which is incubated by stripe and paradigm and so they raised a bunch of money they raised you know 500 million I believe it was publicly announced at a 5 billion valuation so relatively expensive but obviously major partners involved they also announced a new payments protocol today called machine payments protocol or MPPP and so this is a competitor to X42 which is uh authored by more Coinbase and their partners. So, MPPP is co-author co-authored by Stripe and also working with other partners like Visa, etc. And there's a bunch of people building on top. They have 100 plus design partners, Mastercard, OpenAI, Cler. It's kind of

similar to what Miles was talking about before with Facebook and Libra and their partners back then before it ultimately didn't go through. And so, yeah, I think one of the reasons why I'm so bullish on Tempo, as we might get into in the podcast, is I think the team is just so great and stacked. Um, I think they've just got such an amazing team, a team we've never before seen in crypto. I think timing wise, it's so perfect like in a sort of AI and post-regulation era for crypto. Uh, I think they've got all the ingredients they need to create something that actually really reaches mainstream adoption. And so yeah, today Mike Miles and I guess have been discussing over the months of Tempo as a chain, as emperor, as well as maybe a token in future. Uh like how important

is Tempo to crypto? Is it the biggest new infrastructure project we've seen in a while? Uh or is it overhyped? Um and so yeah, I think today we'll be discussing uh the bull and bear for both. Um I'm definitely sitting more on the bull side and I think the other guys maybe swing either neutral and or bearish. So yeah, it should be a good uh good chat. >> Um I would like Okay, I think I'm in the middle here. I just we keep picking stuff that you're super bullish on, Zave. So someone's got to represent the other side here. Um okay, I also want to put into context just why people are so excited about this idea of payment um like kind of chains which are based around an L1 and payments in general.

And maybe to like rewind a little bit, if you think about how stable coin adoption has happened on chain and why there's, you know, some $300 billion of market cap in stable coins, it mostly has to do with trading. So generally st the the story of the distribution of kind of the duopoly of USDT and USDC has to do with trading. And this is part of the reason why if you if you think about Tether as a business and what led to their success, they got two things really right. One that the um they really built their distribution synonymously with offshore exchanges where the majority of trading was happening. They wanted it to be in US dollars but they couldn't access the US

banking system. And that distribution strategy was just so absolutely phenomenal. And then because they figured out where the distribution was, where the customers that actually wanted to hold these stable coins were, they actually also kind of looked into what probably is the bigger market um which is the the offshore dollar market. This is kind of an unintuitive thing, but there's an offshore versus an onshore kind of euro dollar versus dollar market. And Tether really nailed it here. But so far also to a lesser extent, USDC nailed this for onchain trading. Um like the story of USDC is synonymous both with Coinbase as a distribution partner although that's challenging probably for both uh organizations to some extent but also uh

like trading and DeFi as well. But you can look at the distribution of both of those stable coins through the lens of where do people want to trade. But the the the overall use case for dollars in general is is payments um trade flows that that type of thing. And so for a long time, people have been looking at um typical blockchain substrates and saying, you know what, there actually does seem to be a a need here for uh financial infrastructure where stable coins are treated as a first class citizen for payments. And I think that is what has gotten people really really excited. And there's this idea that this could be an even bigger use case and um access to customers distribution than even the legacy guys

had access to like the tethers or the circles of the world. Um and Miles I know you said this is kind of like Ben Thompson but this also this is almost even rewinding further here. This is a kind of the original sin of the internet and browsers that you didn't have payments baked in to begin with. Um so this is a long-term problem that people are really really excited about. I don't know if you can give us some of that context. No, Matthew, I I would just maybe like start on um more more simple like straightforward question is like why not a public why not use an existing public blockchain, right? Um and I do think to some extent tempo arc um you know are reflections of um general purpose blockchains, public blockchains

being um you know not being able to cater to like um businesses that are not currently really underserved, right? Um so like Tether, why has it been successful um on Tron on Ethereum? And by the way, Tron's important there because nobody is arguing that Tron is like this decentralized permissionless blockchain. They're addressing an underserved market, right, that has no access to dollars. And so they're looking just doesn't need to be the perfect solution. It just now they have the access to dollars. USDC played that role for permissionless markets, right, where like others could not. Um, and that was the whole DeFi era. But by and large are have businesses like been

transforming you know their their backends or like their payment systems with stable coins on public blockchains to date like no not really right. Um and I would say the same thing for rwas right and like canon has been you know probably what's looked like you know the the version of of tempo or arc for like uh trady capital markets and in rwas. And so I do think that there's like this um hey okay the we have these like public blockchains we can't control these things we can't build features into these things that we actually want for like specific application or like application or vertical specific use cases like payments right we um do feel like we can you know these these chains

are more or less commoditized if we're looking at volume distribution and Tron is winning that's not a reflection on their decentralization or their tech right Um, so why don't we build our own because we actually control distribution and we know what our customers want and we don't need to go get what our customers want into the Ethereum or Salana road map on a public blockchain where like we don't control it and we're competing with the priorities of other verticals and industries, right? Um so I think that's the first point is like you know this is a failure of Ethereum to listen to their customers or to be able to um offer levels of control that they you know uh basically need right to to have adopted like L2s um it's frankly

easier just to launch an L1 these days like a POA L1 and that's what we're seeing right now. So that's the first part of this. Um and then I think yeah the ad the identicon commerce like part of the bullen bear case. Um you know we can cover that uh second. >> You think like you think it's easier to launch a POA chain than a rollup right now. >> Yeah. It's easier to sell it and the solution to like to the market. I think um when you get into the roll-ups like uh the actual complexity of you know worst case scenarios or like forced exits and things like that and then you know interoperability with other roll-ups. I mean I don't really know but I'm just looking at like the evidence

here. there's far more like POA or like somewhat you know corp what we call like corp chains launching than L2s and L2s are you know that were appsp specific are shutting down and migrating to general purpose L2s um or some of these chains here. So I do think this is you know first and foremost kind of like um a reflection of of public blockchains you know struggling to support the needs of the these like big incumbents for like a particular use case that they actually want. I mean, I would maybe argue that they're kind of different use cases. And I I think I read today in Tempo when they launched, um, from what I understand, Tempo has a kind of lane

in their blocks where they're reserved for payments. And I could be wrong in what I'm saying here, but I don't think it is possible via a layer 2 to have such a lane that then kind of rolls back up to the layer one. I'm not if it is possible. I haven't seen it being done before. So I do think that Tempo is doing quite unique things at the kind of layer one level including that kind of like ordering let's say of transactions and prioritizing payments over other kind of transactions that touch state of that chain. But yeah I agree with you Miles that to some extent I think Ethereum uh like that was the dream was also the Cosmos dream back in the day was also the avalanche dream of like

>> still is still is [clears throat] >> we're going to bring all the corp chains to the cosmos. are going to bring them to Ethereum. Well, actually the corp chains are going to bring themselves on chain and that was like I think maybe the thing that was underestimated and we're seeing that play out live in real time. I do have a bit of a call here to make though and we haven't even gone into the bone bear cases but I do think that temper is the first of many corp chains and my only real bare case for temper right now is a competition in the next 12 to 18 months. I'm actually literally just reading a news article as you were saying that Miles around like SEC approving NASDAQ tokenized equities trading pilot. So like what what this means is like you're seeing now that

TRFI and crypto is like blurring and lines are blurred and I think tempo is a first mover and they're out in front right now and I think their distribution like we've said is is huge. So I am very bullish on the distribution. I question mark for me on the standard like I think it makes sense without going too deep. uh I guess like at the same time as mentioned tempo is a chain we've just talked about as a layer 1 blockchain but they're also trying to introduce their own payment standard for agents and X42 is already a standard that's pretty well adopted in the space their argument is that uh X42 doesn't accept non-crypto payments which I actually understand and I think the argument makes sense and so if they can create a standard that allows for payments outside of crypto as well as lines are blurring with Tradfire

like maybe that does make sense or maybe it doesn't because maybe we just stables longterm anyway, but obviously it's a competing standard with X42 which can blur the lines. But that standard is trying to bring more traffic to to Stripe. But I would assume and estimate that like in the next 6 12 months as we see more corp chains go live, they're just going to come out with their own agentic standards as well. So I'm not sure if it actually moves the space forward in any way in terms of like the actual protocol they announced today. But overall, I I like the protocol. It makes sense. I think it's bullish that like major players like AI players, etc. are trying to adopt it. It's a few lines of code for merchants to to allow crypto payments now in their businesses. So, you know, like as an investor, I guess

in quarter one this year, it's been really hard to look at many businesses because it was clear that tempo was around the corner and they actually are doing and eating a lot of startup businesses lunch right now with their infrastructure, with the distribution, with integrations, with their partners. Like I think the bull bull case for for Tempo is that it's really like the end state for crypto of like it's a fast chain that works. It's private. Everyone can use it. No one knows they're using crypto. I was in again in the Uber today with a friend and he said that he thinks that you know this year the next 12 months it'll be the first app that uses a chain like Tempo which is just like a regular almost like financial app and no one has any idea that he uses crypto underneath. So like again main point

here is that lines are blurring. I think tempo is well placed. It's good timing, but I also think that soon they'll have competition hot on their tails trying to build their own standards and chains and that way into their market share very very fast. >> Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're already seeing that for the agenda commerce like there just massive amount of fragmentation in terms of the standards. Um, but I think like the original bare case for corp chains or for private chains, um, you can go back all the way to like Chris Dixon writing about the strong and weak tech pairs. Uh, I think it was like 2019 saying public blockchains are strong, private blockchains are weak. The failures have always been about um incentive

misalignment um between the members and honestly like control, right? Um, so [sighs and gasps] do we see like uh Audian, you know, and Brainree like the other big PSPs, you know, hopping on board Tempo? Like I would imagine not. Um, and then we end up with ledger like fragmentation, which is could be even worse than kind of like what we have today, which crypto was originally like meant to solve, right? Um, so the new intermediaries become these bridges and oracles and that's an ugly like, you know, scene. Or, you know, maybe maybe I'm wrong. Maybe maybe Tempo is able to like um position itself as neutral enough to even um and to even to even

get like the, you know, activity of its competitors onto the chain. Um, or maybe it doesn't need it because if it just gets a decent percentage of Stripe's, you know, payment volume, then that that would be enough. Before we get back into the episode, here's a quick word from our sponsor, Canton, the only public permissionless blockchain built for institutional finance. >> Tradfi wasn't built for 24/7 markets. DeFi wasn't [music] built for regulated institutions. But Canton is where the power of finance meets the promise of blockchain. [music] The only public blockchain with institutional-grade privacy, true composability, real [music] assets, real markets.

Why reinvent finance [music] when Canton makes it work the way it should? Canton, where finance flows. So, all right guys, I want to actually uh we you we're 20 minutes in here and I want to just describe like what is I mean this is going to sound really simple at a high level but what is Stripe and their business model um and then where does this fit in and then we can kind of start to reverse engineer like the bull and bear case like what needs to be happen for this to be for this to be successful and then what are the obstacles that stripe is going to run into here because ultimately you're talking about a gigantic problem that um I actually want to just there's We'll link it in the show notes, but Ben Thompson wrote a great piece about that called this called the original sin of

the internet. Um, and the original sin being you couldn't do payments in browser. And that actually had a hu that was a huge part of why because the brow browsers couldn't do payments. The business model of the internet shifted towards being an ad-based model. And the challenge was one the margins uh aren't the basically that the challenge is you're still limited by the banks. the banks are the ones that actually are the ones who can move money. And if you're relying on the banks, if the banks don't really want to do it, then you're kind of up shit's creek. And Mark Andre, who was obviously at the forefront of this with Mosaic, uh, pre-Netswuite, you know, he, you know, he articulated this, which was he actually thought it was a huge mistake to go to the payment the,

uh, the card networks, so Mastercard and Visa, because ultimately they didn't want to play ball and so they didn't play ball. They had to figure something else out. And now so Stripe's business today is still mostly a payment processor, right? So like and they they have about 4 million merchants in their network. Most of these their niche was kind of online businesses. So we use Stripe for instance to process every ticket payment that we sell for Digital Asset Summit. They take about 2.9% plus 30 cents of each transaction. So you can already see there part of the reason why like unit economics of it don't work for things like microp payments and agents which maybe we can get into maybe we won't. Um but ultimately Stripe is still limited here. They've kind of moved into

some other verticals like invoice and billing and tax but it's still mostly just payment volume. And if you think about the stack of a payment right they're an application that sits on top of the underlying rails. Just to put it really simply, what uh Stripe sees with Tempo is the ability to own the rails and more directly monetize the activity that they can flood into their network. So, you know, a couple of things have to be true. Um, one, you need to actually be able to build good technology, but two, you need to build an ecosystem, right? So they're starting with a huge head start with their 4 million merchants, but ultimately there's a the world's a very big place and in like there's an analog here to Visa where

like we should talk about how Visa got built because part of the the core under maybe to introduce some of the challenge or like what has to be true for Tempo to be successful is they're going to need they're going to need to convince everyone who isn't in their network to leverage and build on top of this and build an ecosystem. So just to like explain some of you know what we're talking about here and then maybe we can get into the core components of what tempo is like the from an architecture perspective and then start to lay out pros and cons bull bear cases here but I just wanted to provide that context for listeners about how it all fits in.

>> Yep. And I would also call out that we should be careful about separating like the net new activity that Tempo is talking about with like uh microp payments and like agent commerce from the existing like stripe business of those 4 million customers, right? Because those four million customers really like card payments. They like receiving card payments. They're okay with receiving card payments even though it's because they're paying 2 or 3% for a bundled package, right? that is what helps them like there's there's there's uh you know the irreversibility of like crypto transactions is a bug right even though that's what enables it to you know uh us to like facilitate micro

payments um but things like how do you like handle chargebacks disputes all of that stuff right like merchants that that is a massive massive headache and so I don't think I just want to be like to be clear to the audience that we're not like saying that Stripe is you know as soon Tempo launches like 4 million, you know, merchants that use Stripe are just going to start ac like accepting stable coins and want that, right? Um, and I think that is like the the the big question of okay, if Stripe processes what is that like 1.7% of the world's GDP right now or something like that, they have like that great metric like what percent of that is actually going to be converted to stable coins on on Tempo? Uh what will be new on top of

that, right? that is like just agent payments or this new standards and things like that. So it's not super it's not super straightforward of like yeah they just flip a switch and now all of a sudden all of stripe merchants run on tempo or >> also Miles just to qualify something that you said for where the margin occurs in payments why these payment processors get to charge what they do. It has to do with charge chargebacks and reconciliation. So the intuition here is if you are uh you you use your Visa or your MX to buy something and it's fraudulent and you complain to your credit card operator, they will often refund you. Um they have to build that margin in, right, for things like fraud,

chargebacks, all that. It's a it's a demandfriendly it's it's it's friendly to the user of a credit card, but it gets subsidized by the margin that everyone else pays on each of their transactions. So that just doesn't exist in stable coins and it's a trade-off and it's unclear right now. You know, generally when you think about a marketplace, you want to optimize for the demand side. So actually in a sense, stable coins are far less friendly to demand side of the marketplace. Uh as well, just to I just want to qualify something that you said there for the >> Yeah, I just want to make one point uh on top of what Miles said, building on his point. What will be very interesting to see is the merchant adoption, I think, in the next 6 to 12 months. Um, I personally, maybe I've gotten it a bit

wrong in terms of timing of enterprise acceptance of crypto postregulation. I thought by now there would be more enterprises dipping their toes in. We worked very closely with one portfolio company in particular which was targeting the ERP market, so SAP, Oracle, and targeting private payments there. And his feedback as of very very recently was that the market was very very slow to adopt. And so even though it's very easy for merchants to adopt uh with Tempo, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to feel comfortable enough to do it in the next three to six months even if Stripe sort of push it on them. So that for me is a case for Tempo of like potentially we are overestimating

merchant adoption of stable coins uh and it might actually take longer than we will expect. I'm not putting that out of the question. So that's a bit of a not a bare case, but it could slow adoption I think of tempo if if that's the case. >> Yeah. But you have and you have to ask why, right? Like the the the question is not if now they can just like turn on stable coins for like accepting stable coins, right? It's like what motivates them? What's the sense of urgency here? Um, I do think that they're looking at like a a net new type of payment and and design space where you fund your agent to go complete a task or build a website, build a feature, etc., etc., right? Um, and it's able to now make like, you know, pay usage based like

micro payments or something like that to um, a merchant that basically only turns this on because it's like, oh yeah, if you turn this on, you're going to have like I don't know some percent more revenue just waiting for you from from agents that are like, you know, accessing you via APIs every month like and but that to be clear is not like that is definitely the um the smallest part of the market, right? You're going to need to make have so much volume and that's going to take a long time for that to actually like represent a significant portion of like um Stripe's total volume like uh process rate and yeah I I also just think that merchants in the next 12 to 18 months a I do think

there's a scenario where they could be slow to adopt and b I think by the time they have adopted the tech I do think there's a scenario where there's a lot of competition so merchants have a choice of you Revolute chain and stripe chain and maybe two or three other chains and then is it a race at the bottom where they're all competing on fees and that's how they acquire merchants the ones that are ready anyways. So I'm much more bullish personally on the AI agentic kind of case of agents adopting the standard they're coming out with agentic flows going through their rails. I'm I'm less bullish on the enterprise market case or their existing market they already have because I think that's more competitive and it's going to be harder for them to crack into long term. That's a bit of a a high level in the two markets for me.

>> Everyone in crypto loves to talk about transparency, but would any serious business publish its payroll for the world to see or hand competitors its contracts? That's not a feature. That's a bug. And it's why most financial institutions can't operate on today's public rails. Canton network is different. It's the only public permissionless layer 1 blockchain built with privacy at its core, sharing data only on a need to- know basis. That's why Goldman Sachs, NASDAQ, and Broadridge are already building on the network. Only Canton delivers the network effects of a public chain with the privacy and control real finance demands. Learn more about Canton by following the link in today's show notes.

Okay, let's start to get into um what some of the bold cases are for Tempo. How big could this thing get? Um, Zave, uh, maybe to just run down some of the some of the ideas that we currently have is, you know, and we were starting to talk about this a little bit, but one, uh, yeah, there's this original sin of browsers and like everyone kind of had this early idea that, you know, payment was going to be big on the internet. We just never fully got there. So, this is an old idea that people generally are very bullish on um, and understand needs to happen. And it feels like with Tempo that could be the the kind of back end.

uh two uh kind of this connection in between stable coins and microp payments because you know one of the uh just the dynamics of not having things like chargebacks and it's not a credit based system. It settles instantly. Um you don't have that extra margin built in there and what you get for that is being able to make small payments. So you don't have that 30 cent per payment, you know, as a way of cutting off the the tail end for uh Stripe to make sure that they're not, you know, getting getting screwed too hard on individual the individual unit economics of payment. um one you know stripes distribution as a moat here um and then uh you know this idea of sessions um as well. So can we just start to get into like what are

some of the like bull cases for why this thing could be big and what would make it work really well here like what could this look like? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think we've already touched on quite a few already. I I do think like starting from a technical perspective in terms of like the bullcase for for tempo, it's hard in the age of AI to just judge a project on its merits when it comes to tech. But it's very clear right now, at least for me, it just hit mainet today, but like Tempo's tech at the moment at least is the best in market. And so I do think with regards to the way they've built it, I think Miles and all of us were talking before about like the different

lanes that you know I guess payments have versus regular transactions that touch state and smart contracts. They want to be the payments chain and I think a lot of other chains are going for this like Tron is going for this worth. I think plasma is going for this as well. Like there are many chains trying to be the payments chain, but I don't think anyone has struck the right cord yet. And I think Tempo theoretically with the setup like they have the best setup in terms of internally with their team and externally with the people they're working with as well as the tech itself like I was mentioning. And so it's EVM compatible. They're going to have other app developers deploy contracts on their chain. I do think another thing we haven't mentioned yet in general is just like I the way for me to win as a

payments chain long term. It's actually beyond the distribution partners because as Miles was saying before as well like a lot of these teams want to control their economics and there's a danger that a lot of these teams if they see success of Stripe and Tempo that they're going to want to create the chain themselves to create their own economics but the bull case is that all teams in crypto especially agentic teams adopt the standard. And I think the standard is the most important. Why is it the most important? It's because the standard then leaks value back to tempo chain. It directs value to tempo chain. And so if they can get teams, Salana, Ethereum, etc. building smart contracts all using the standard all being settled on tempo building network effects from that further liquidity further distribution cryptonative distribution I

think is a big win if they manage to achieve that. The risk is if they don't achieve that, if they don't tap into an ecosystem or new applications or net new markets or net new agents and other competitors come into that, I think it can get very competitive for them very very fast there. But in short, like I just think right now when it comes to tempo, they're out in front with with aentic microp payments as well as you were saying Mike around I've spoken with many teams this quarter uh trying to build different ways of having agents sort of pay for things in a very cheap way and as you mentioned before Mike uh agents haven't had a chance to do this before. I not to present a bull and a bear case at the same time, but I do think that the standard itself like what

I'm struggling with as an investor is how hard is the standard to build and why would someone adopt the standard like over other standards that come out in future. And I do think the bull case again for stripe is that the standard gets adopted. But the question for me really is right now is like why would that standard be adopted over others and their claim at the moment is that it will be adopted because you have players like Visa etc where you can you can have agents interact and pay for things in things outside of crypto. The question then becomes a question of like do agents want to pay with with things outside of crypto like I don't think any of us actually know the answer to that question yet and yet that answer itself could be the actual reason that stripe or tempo does win this race and so yeah

it comes down to the standard but at least theoretically right now they have found a way to make it very very cheap for agents to interact with APIs in a very cheap way using microtransactions settling on their blockchain. We mentioned the the distribution already, but of course crypto has a distribution problem. Uh we've seen Telegram and Ton and there was always you know views for platforms have had a lot of users. Stripe is the first platform we've seen I guess apart from Libra where they've gone live with existing major players uh in tech and so this is exciting to see.

We actually haven't seen it before. uh as Miles was saying before again presenting the bare case at the same time like the risk the most bullish thing is that the teams and the partners align and they get the governance right but that also is unprecedented in crypto itself. So we've just spoken about before on the podcast that the risk is as well that the teams don't come together and the incentives aren't aligned and then of course the whole thing breaks. So I think that is another real risk but of course the upside there is that they have distribution. They did 1.4 4 trillion in in volume in you know a year or two ago and it's in the trillions their volume now. So if they can eat a percentage of that and the infrastructure of course that's massive.

One thing else you want to mention on the tech side is to do with state channels and I was reading a tweet today uh from a guy called Liam Horn who's been building in the space since 2017. Uh, interestingly, a lot of tempo scaling is offchain and so like again we were talking about before layer ones versus layer twos where layer 2s are an off-chain scaling technology for me even though I haven't read all the docs of tempo it looks like tempo is a layer one with a lot of off-chain scaling technologies they're kind of almost building their own layer twos baked in and I think like these state channels are almost they call them sessions which on a high level if you want to abstract it is let's say in a future where we're interacting with our agents and we want to access like a news article on block

works for example. Uh I would open a session with let's say like the block works API and then as soon as I open that session whenever I consume data or anything from block works at a later time it has my identity and I already it can take from my account whenever because I've already given it permission. So it's a way for me to give permission to my account for using block works as services and blockworks can see my ID and give access to my account only with one transaction and obviously you can imagine a lot of costs being saved there. So that itself is a big innovation and that again could be a big reason why Stripe and Tempo does win this agentic space. But yeah, timing couldn't be better. Regulation obviously is in a great spot. That's why these major players are coming in. I do think

the agentic commerce space is up for taking and I do think Stripe is the first player here and they've got a lot of things right so far. It's really going to be theirs to lose. I think to some extent with regards to like maybe governance and competitors, I I do think people like Revolute will launch their own chains. The question will be like do those get adopted as well. But yeah, it's it's a very open space I think in terms of like it's it's not as clear to me right now that Tempo in two or three years time is going to be like the biggest payments chain. We've had that claim before from Plasma. And last thing I want to mention actually which not necessarily a bull or a bear case, but if you think about the payments chain winner right now is Tron. Mike, you

mentioned that before and I'm curious to hear you guys take a second on this, but Tron has done very well in emerging markets and USDT maybe gray areas. Tempo is a complete different goto market approach. It's corporate, it's enterprise, it's American, like is there demand there? Like that's a big question for me. Like we're talking about like the merchants are the demand. Do they want the stables flowing through the like their businesses or not? That's like TBD. Whereas emerging markets very very clear they wanted USDT. They needed the dollars. They would pay money for it. They're paying Tron big fees which is another bullcase for Stripe potentially but also a bare case like we mentioned before. Stripe needy I think they're charging one micro or something per transaction like they will need millions and billions and trillions but that's how they're thinking about this

which they can achieve but Tron charges a dollar or two per transaction right now and their only transfers are about 100 bucks and so the bull case here is that tempo has built in for to sustain the demand but the question is like is the demand there yet and there's a question on timing of the demand because the demand is definitely there in emerging markets from humans but is the demand there from agents right now to pay for services And is tempo actually the best standard and the best way for agents to pay long term? And does it get the best outcome for users? Like these are open questions I think that we actually don't know right now because Stripe is top down telling merchants and businesses, hey adopt this tech, put this SDK in, accept stable coins. The question is bottom up to like agents

actually want to adopt the standard and the humans controlling these agents yet get the best result for using Tempo's tech. So not necessarily a bull or a bear case there. There are just a few open questions I think which I'm not sure any of us have the answer to around things that might work really well for Tempo but also things that maybe Tempo needs to watch out for. >> Yeah, I think um you know it's interesting Z hearing you. So first of all there's the tech um which matters an enormous amount. Here's my like just as >> No, it doesn't. [laughter] It No, no, no. The first big order of magnitude does. So I was going to put like a um an asterisk attached to that. So what doesn't matter in my opinion is like this is why none of the new even faster Salana worked because once you once you

go from you know $30 a transaction to like 0.001 cents like that 99.99% drop is that's where you get all of the um initial traction and then going from 0.001 cents to 0.0000 it just it doesn't that's not enough right? you've already done most of it and by the time you've made that big incremental step change you've been able to build enough critical mass. Um, so I think there'll be for Stripe some amount of that, right? And I think just making a a something which is a vertically integr like the bull case for me for Stripe is that you have the distribution, they're also vertically integrated, then they're a well-run company and right from day one they can reduce a ton of cost. So they actually have a big they have an

incentive to push their merchants onto this standard. They don't want to pay, right? Like there's just if you if you look at the whole uh stack of a transaction um if you if a huge percent of the percentage of your margin is going towards you know the people who are sitting underneath you if you can remove them then you can charge less to your existing customers right um two they've actually done a phenomenal job of not only onboarding like they've onboarded bridge and privy they're building out a full stack vertically integrated piece of infrastructure that's probably born from them being just a thin app on top of a ton of infrastructure that already exists. So it's kind of like the Mark Zuckerberg thing when he wanted to be a platform.

Like I think it kind of sits at you, right? If you're if you're a thin app that sits on top, you have distribution, but also at the same time, you know, you suffer from not like you strategically I think that's why so many of these banks and payments providers want to build the whole thing to start with. So Z, I agree with the point that you made at the top of this episode. There's going to be a [ __ ] ton of these things. Um I think there's going to be a ton. Um, and then on the Yeah, I kind of think there's a there's a big advantage for Stripe here being a being a first first mover. And then the last thing too is these agent payments, you know, agentic payments are just so obviously going to happen and it's so obviously going to be

a massive market that anyone that can get there first and having a connection with Open AI, which is the consumer app, they've got a pretty good shot, right? Like these are all the the bull cases. to get into some of the the bare cases here. Um I think the core one actually the rest are kind of tertiary to this. There's an idea of neutrality um to me that is the biggest bare case for tempo and I don't I think a part of this is what is going to deliver the best um case for users the best experience for users but also stripe is going to have to onboard a bunch of other competitors here and it won't just be like what these competitors are going to ask themselves is is this deepening the moat or the capabilities of someone who has a

competitive business to me and I think the answer to that is going to be yes it is right like I just cannot imagine Aden or you know any of these other card networks where they have strong relationships with merchants what do you think they're going to say they're going to be like don't do this don't on board here and I like my prediction to the response of the industry to tempo I think they're going to try to coales around something which is neutral and there's a the history of this actually is one of the card networks themselves which is Visa and I'm not going to bore everyone with this long piece of history but the way that credit emer like consumerf facing credit emerged in the United States. you used to just have individual like restaurants that you know it would be like hey settle up with

me at the end of the month right and that was the impetus for these like diners club you know type of things where your credit you know was measured across all the restaurants and then finally Bank of America launched this program the bank America card um which ultimately they suffered because they couldn't they're like all of their banking competitors were like I don't want to funnel this to you and so this guy Dehawk one of the coolest founding stories ever uh convinced the CEO of Bank of America to hand him control of this card so that it was a neutral standard and you needed that neutrality to onboard and even then it almost didn't happen. So I think actually the biggest bare case for Tempo is that you're going to get active resistance from everyone else in the payment ecosystem who does not want to see this

succeed because it's just going to benefit a competitor. Even if it's the best solution, they're going to say like I don't don't get on this. Um, >> right. Because it represents stable coins, which maybe they're fighting against too, not just Stripe, which is their competitor, right? >> It's just like all the banks are freaking out about stable coins and now they're seeing someone that was originally built on top of their stack trying to vertically integrate. Like they're just going to face opposition from every angle. Um, I think is the is the challen going to be the the big challenge here. Uh, >> yep. And yet if they if they can get basically all like even a decent percentage of transactions that are originated from a claude or from an open AI prompt, right? Like I think they'll

be massively successful. Um but like there is a decision tree there where it's like okay I'm originating it from an agent. the agents deciding between card or stable coins and then within stable coins which chain to use and it's like you know it's not it's not totally obvious that that is it's just just kind of like flip a switch and it's all going to run on tempo but they have some levers that they can pull at least within their existing like merchant you know user base to say like you know maybe it's like the PayPal thing where they give you like some actual like just concrete incentives to use this and and to accept stable coins like on tempo and then where they differentiate which I think the fact that they're just like a traditional blockchain is like and Cosmos is kind of bearish honestly. Like

I think there's very little room like juice to squeeze left in blockchains and they have more or less the same problems that they did 10 years ago except they're can be a lot cheaper now. Um and you see that with the state channel like announcement today like they are just going to be pushing more and more offchain. They do differentiate I think on what really matters which is the on and offramp abstraction right like bridge is vertically integrated into this chain more or less and they are like one of the leading providers of on and off ramps and so to the extent that users don't have any idea that like USD on their screen has been you know converted to stable coins and merchants have no idea that USD on their screen is stable coins when they like withdraw it

back into their bank account like that that does matter matter a lot. I think um I don't think like the you know an ultra optimized Cosmos chain versus Tron actually matters like that. I think pushing a lot off chain. >> Um yeah, go for it. >> Yeah, just I I think an interesting bull vbear case to present might be around future autonomous agentic businesses. Like I think the bull case for Tempo is that autonomous agents run their own businesses on chain and they actually manage the treasuries and all that and use the standards that Tempo is making.

Uh because that market is just going to continue to grow. The bare case is that when agents are autonomous and they run their own businesses on chain that they bypass Tempo and the standards and any economics that Tempo is trying to take for themselves and create their own chain or something like that long term, which is kind of weird to think about right now, but like the way that the space is moving, uh, like that could happen. And so we I think Tempo is building for an aentic future as humans would see it, but we don't really know autonomous agents how they're going to see it in like one or two years time. And I think that is the bull and the bear case presented in potentially one >> there like three categories of like this agentic emerging commerce space. It's like the micro payments which are brand

new right and that is now to let agents like search the web and actually use services without an API. Then there's like the middle market which is let's call it like consumer commerce. Um and that's when you're now on you know chat to BT saying buy me a green sweater. That feels like cards are going to stick. like I I just don't see stable coins taking like I I don't see the reason why they would. It's harder um for a user to onboard, right, and get that done. Then there's the enterprise stuff which is like the B2B back office automations. Um and those the the you know the first one is like nobody has any idea how big this is going to be. It could subsume like the entire you know digital commerce space at some point in

the next 10 to 20 years. uh the middle two I'm less bullish on like stable traditional like stable coin networks in the in the mid at least near the order to midterm um because it require it's a it's a multiplayer game right not only does the person sending the stable coins need to like say yes the person accepting it needs to be okay accepting it um and so I yeah I I just think it's going to take a little bit of time to see like um if it's all net new activity that's microp payment driven and autonomous companies that are all agent native from the very beginning. Um, you know, how quickly does that emerge and it could take a while.

>> There's another there's another thing. Um, the you guys both hate when I say this because I'm touching on microp payments and agents and timing. But here's the um I've never as a someone who puts out content, I've never been a fan of microp payments because it's so directly against the incentives of anyone that publishes content. Um, it's why you'll almost never find anyone that does it um that's willing to do this. Um there like the bundling mod if you everyone from people who host television channels to networks themselves to individual movie studios to newspapers to podcast hosts to substackers.

Everyone is bundling their content. The economics kind of break is as soon as you do a microp payment. Look, maybe that's just going to be the future, but here's what here's what has to happen. Um, in order for that to be the case, you need an overwhelming amount of demand for payments to come from agents before people will seriously think about this. And just to give you an like actual numbers here, uh, said we were going to talk about Misari a little bit, although their competitor like, you know, have a ton of respect. I think it's a very bold move, but um, uh, like Nansen, Msari, Alium, they all have MCPs where they've kind of unbundled and you can do like a per like via X42, X42.

Uh the total revenue generated in the last 30 days for Nansen's $142. Uh Misari it's $84. Ali it's $76. So that absolutely is most likely going to swell. The question is though like look if you're running a business that has headcount and you can't raise tens of millions of dollars to fill the gap. If you're two years too if you're even a year too early you're in an enormous amount of trouble. So how do you as an operator bridge the gap? Um, like that's just, you know, you can say like as someone who like, you know, we've been hosting DAS for 6 years. Um, sorry, 7 years. I'm glad we're doing it now, but I got to be honest, for the first like three years, it's [ __ ] painful. Um,

and [laughter] like sometimes it hurts so so bad to be early. And, you know, when you look at these things on 20-year time scales, you're like, obviously, but guess what? Everyone has payroll. Um, you know, being even two years too early in business can be the same thing as being wrong. and there's not a ton of money to go around, right? Right. So, there's even if all of the technical stuff worked tomorrow, there's a behavior change that needs to happen. And so, it's just going to take some time for the for the economics to become a no-brainer and obvious. So, I think that's the other thing about this that's so hard to gauge is there's no revenue being everyone is saying it's obviously going to be happen in trillions. People are throwing around crazy numbers, but no numbers have materialized like none.

>> Yeah, I agree. >> That's the problem. But at the enterprise level like we see uh what is Meta is going to cut like 20 20,000 jobs right um and eventually this it already is leading into like back office functions that will move money right and [clears throat] that's what I'm actually more excited about um is like or not in the very very near term um is is thinking about okay if there are like true productivity and you're not only Like if you automate part of your business with agents, you're looking at both topline improvements and like bottom line improvements from a cost margin standpoint, that's motivating.

Okay, they're going to have to like, you know, a good chunk of those are going to be touching money. They need like very very, you know, um they're not going to compromise on control or trust. Like that to me is where this is really interesting in the near term. um if you can give them you know these enterprises like sufficient safety guarantees uh or liability guarantees on top of like the um you know the the gains uh and the cost reduction but uh you know I don't it's it's not that is not what like MP is trying to do to be clear here um and but and it could actually happen in the near term we'll see >> yeah yeah maybe just to chip in briefly um yeah I think Mike you raised a good

point like Basically your point is that AI is disrupting many businesses and they have different needs including commerce which Tempo is trying to target. It obviously disrupts other businesses like Block Works, other data businesses like Misari. Uh startups are cutting staff. Uh incumbents are cutting staff. So like I think really the takeaway point here is that like I've never at least in my working life experienced anytime like this before where like I feel like everything has just been completely disrupted. Update your prior like every day. I feel like I'm getting a little bit clearer now actually at the end of quarter 1 2026 around what it looks like. Um I do think going back to the microtransactions

point Mike which which you raised. Um, yeah. Interestingly, I I also think from Ben Thompson, who you we brought up at the start of the podcast, he always talks about the fact that like text ads or ads in text form will sort of go away because agents when interacting with data, they're not going to care about kind of text ads. And that's why we're going towards microtransactions because agents just get the job done with APIs and they don't they're not human like humans. we have attention and we engage and we sometimes the outcome we want and we get distracted and that's the value for the advertiser because they can distract us and get the value from us.

the agent doesn't get distracted like the agent just pays for to get the outcome it wants and so the question there is like with APIs and microtransactions and all of that like what does the agent want like I don't think any of us here or potentially in the space even know that and like why are they using X42 or tempo standard to pay for what they pay for and ultimately I think the sort of sequence will be agents will work for humans first and so it'll be what the human wants and agents are going to get really really good at getting outcomes for users where that stage right now than what I was talking about before. Eventually, agents will own their own agents and then build autonomous businesses, but we're kind of far away from that. I also think we're actually far away from enterprise

adoption of like some of this tech for what it's worth. And even enterprise agent crypto adoption, like those three words together, [laughter] I think if you put like I don't know if like that's happening anytime soon to be completely honest. Um I I agree with all this. Like here's here's just a weird analogy. Let's just replace the word. Let's say agents were perfect tomorrow. And actually, just for a weird exercise, let's say it wasn't agents. You had aliens that came down and they have like they're perfect. They're like organisms, super intelligent, they can do everything you want, but they have totally different preferences. And the different preferences means that you as a business have to adopt different ways of charging them, right? Like so much in business exists because of weird foibless. If you like there have been all these studies where you'd be better

off paying a financial adviser a flat fee of $10,000 instead of a percentage of aum. No one wants to play pay a flat fee. So we have these really shitty percentage of aum because of some weird foil of how humans work. Same thing, right? Like there are there's essentially an alien race that is going to be directing a lot of stuff that is totally different. Um and actually the limitation might not be on agents at all. Agents might show up tomorrow and be perfect, but the the limiting factor here is how fast businesses can adapt. Um and it's it's just there's a learning curve here and it doesn't happen necessarily overnight. Can I actually because we were talking about tempo, can I end with a prediction on where I actually see tempo going. Um, what I I think it will be massive. And Zave, I

know you have the strongest opinions on this. I'm kind of directing this at you. I think what uh Stripe's going to roll out Stripe is a $200 billion company. They have massive distribution. I think what they're going to end up with is a really good vertically integrated product, but I do not think that they're going to be the default payment layer for global finance. That would be my I think it will be successful for them. I think they will eliminate cost. They'll unlock different payment types. They might win a big share share of uh agent payments, but I don't see them I can't see a world to be honest where um they become the global standard because of the competitive dynamics that I laid out. And also first of all paradigm like talk about evolving um and iterating on

the VC business model. I mean they went from you know purely making tech bets to actually incubating and like I have so much respect for them but one thing is I don't think of them as the most like humanitarian you know missionary people in the whole world and I just I don't think it lines up with with the brand not a shot at all at paradigm like 100% my respect I think some of the best investors to ever do it but I still think the branding is a challenge um so that's why I think it will be very successful for stripe and probably the tempo team um but I can't see it fulfilling its destiny as becoming the the neutral kind of zone and because of the neutrality issue. That's it.

>> I I think for me neutrality isn't an issue. I think that if Stripe doesn't succeed, it'll be more for reasons to do with agentic workflows and agents how they want to transact on chain as opposed to like how humans think they want to transact on chain like I was saying before. So like I don't think agents will care that much about like the number of nodes in the network long term but they probably do care a lot about like price relevancy and getting the outcomes that they want and I don't even know right now if we have the infrastructure and blockchain to even fulfill these agent requirements in future like people are building different directions in this right now.

I do think, you know, from some of the demos I've seen in Tempo so far today, it is very cool seeing like a bunch of businesses open up their APIs and receive microtransactions and deliver this data to agents in certain ways. So like that for me is the bull case. I can see Stripe standard being adopted already is I think 100 design partners plus trying to use this. I can see volume going through this. My prediction is this. I think that tempo is going to be a massive success in the short term. And so I think the next 12 months like it's going to look very very good. I can see this going to the billions of dollars. I can see volume going to the billions. I can see this happen very very fast, much faster than anyone anticipates. Then I can see Revolute being like, "Hey, this looks pretty

good. Like why don't we do this and try and hook into some merch and then I can see all the other ones do the same thing in six months." And it like Tempo launched this. I think they only announced the chain like six months ago. So this has been like an insane push. Tempo does have the best warfare team full stop like don't get me wrong. So that is a bit of a model in itself but I do think that if Revolute had the resources they could also come out build the same chain and so I think the market will grow fast. Temper will own it really really well then I think it'll be like you know maybe like three or four pop up like in the future and they'll all kind of dominate different areas of the market but it is growing much like

fintech is itself like Stripe and Revolute and Brex and Ramp and like whoever the heck it is like these days they're all going to want to own the infrastructure. It's never been easier to build a chain post regulation and own the economics. So look at the business itself and then if it has a chain or not like that's just going to cut fees like you were saying Mark and so it'll be vertically very good for the business maybe like look very hyped in the short term and then longterm people realize that hey this is great for the business itself uh but maybe you know less so in terms of like not well dominating like Ethereum as a global currency or something like that. So like that would be my case for it. You know what I'm also I'm starting to thread this into my I completely agree Z with what you so I

think there's an instinct at and also just like poking around talking to some of the banks and the pay there is an instinct for control also many people who operate in or like many of the different players that operate in finance are used to operating within the bounds of a stack and they're uniquely aware of the limitations of being just a player in the stack as opposed to owning the full stack. So, I think the natural instinct before there's that, you know, we did an episode a couple months back on the value chain and where you're going to play. I think the knee-jerk instinct of almost every corporate is going to be, I want to own the whole thing. I think they're all going to say that. But then I think for a number of reasons, they're going to say, "Oo, owning the full stack means I got to

like build an ecosystem and I got to maintain it and I got to grow it and I got to get others to build on it." And I think you know how you know that old saying about like the market does the thing that causes the most pain to the most people. The view that I'm slowly coming around on here is that people are sleeping on Ethereum and rollups and I do think they're going to slowly make it better and improve it. Um and I so I simultaneously think everyone was kind of right and no one will be happy and that the rollup scaling road map's going to work but there's also no reason for ETH to go up. Like I I think that's like generally the consensus of the future that I'm now thinking through, right?

Like and honestly like everything that I hear Vitalik say like not a slam. It's just I'm listening to what Vitalik is saying and I'm believing him that he will achieve that vision. And so I don't actually like okay I was getting bullish on the price of ETH before when it looked like we're going to scale to one L1 and generate some fees. Now that he's not saying that I'm like okay I can't really be bullish on it. But I do think the ecosystem I guess I'm in to end all of this because Tempo fits in here. These like silent or island siloed POA chains I just don't see as the end state. I think they're all going to try it and we're not going I'm not going to know if this prediction is right for like 5 years because I think they're all going to swarm in and try and think

they're going to realize it doesn't. They're going to run that analysis of where does it belong in the value chain and I think they're actually the rollup framework is going to make a lot of sense for a lot of these guys. is they're going to end up on Ethereum and I think it will improve their product offering and depending on what Ethereum decides to do it might be valuable for ETH but in the current shape it's not looking good for the price of ETH. So >> I like that. I like that. It's like the success is also the undoing of this corp chain thesis because it's just like okay yeah we can do this we want like this product but we don't necessarily want it you know uh there will probably be a couple more corp chains and then it will come back full circle to understand that

you can make as much money as they are without needing your own >> without all the pain in the ass of running the chain. >> Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's fair. Um >> that I'm generally generally aligned with that. >> I wish Stripe was public. That's what I wish. Um like or you can go public guys. >> Yeah. Well, they need a dehawk like somebody who's going to clearly separate the this new thing from the be Bank of America and write and like is a true visionary and gets everybody on board um for the greater benefits. What happens if this thing is successful? I haven't seen that yet from Tempo. You know what it would just this was the writing was on the wall here when the circle IPO happened and it popped um and it popped like whatever it like you know did like

a 5x immediately or whatever it did. I was like, man, you got to imagine Stripe equity is looking pretty good here post their bridge acquisition, but it's private. You can't get your hands on it. And uh it's yeah, it's a little annoying, but um >> maybe they're just waiting to tokenize that equity >> on Tempo for the right time. >> The big question, which we haven't even talked about in this episode, is the Tempo token. So that >> is there one? Is there one? >> I don't think any is announced or >> we know there we know there's no like L1 gas token. And we know there's like this um sort of like an abstracted and interchangeable stable coin token.

>> I mean the question is does value acrru to the token or the equity? And I don't think any of us know the answer to that right now. And that could also be a big piece in the puzzle for the bull or the bear case. >> For sure. For sure. >> I'm starting to gradually align pretty hard to the idea that having two instrument Sorry, I've been aligned to this idea to repeat it is that having two instruments does not make sense. um like I >> but but but but calling it just Stripe, right? That hurts its ability to be, you know, wide and neutral, right? Um so it's definitely going to be a separate equity entity or it's going to be a separate token entity and it's not not clear which type of organization it is.

Do those even need to be separate? Like [snorts] I mean look at what the So the SEC just put out a a they're they're putting together a proposal to eliminate quarterly reporting. the strains of being public, the overhead and strains of being public is emerging at the same time that you know what I I think a a um you know I'm starting to hear just a lot more about like the SPV shenanigans and the craziness of you know getting into these open AI and anthropic rounds and I think we're converging on honest I know this a far out prediction but I just don't think that these things are going to be separate um that you know in the near f maybe not the near future but tokens feel like the endgame um crypto But in the meantime, you know, that's 10

maybe 10 years from now. It's so hard to figure out what's going to happen in between now and then, but you're starting to see like Across was super interesting. We didn't really talk about this, but Across went from being, hey, we want to be a token play to we're go converting to equity, whereas AB is kind of dep prioritizing Labs equity and aligning. Morpho only has the token. So, some teams are choosing tokens, some teams are choosing equity, but maybe they end up being pretty similar. Um, depending on what how the SEC decides to regulate this, but I don't know. I'd be a bull on the token. Um, for what it's worth, like there is you kind of have to be, right?

I mean, uh, yeah, I think so. It's a store of value, guys. It's a sovereign sovereign payment store of value. You got to have that monetary premium, you know. Yeah. [snorts] Um, all right guys, this was a ton of fun. Uh, looking forward to doing it live um at D. >> Yeah. >> Next week. Um, Z, get some sleep, buddy. Um, you are not you're not jetlagged. Uh, >> no. >> Yeah. >> Cool, guys. This was a ton of fun. See you next week. >> See you next week. See you.