How Libra Was Killed. I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan’s pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this. As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a stablecoin that we built with my team at @Meta. It would’ve solved global payments at scale. Prior to announcing the project, we spent months briefing key regulators in DC and abroad. We then announced the project in June 2019 alongside 28 companies. Two weeks later, I was called to testify in front of both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, which was the starting point of two years of nonstop work and changes to appease lawmakers and regulators. By spring of 2021 (yes they slow played us at every step), we had addressed every last possible regulatory concern across financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, buffers, and so much more, and we were ready to launch. We had worked on a slow rollout of a limited pilot that some members of the Fed’s Board of Governors were supportive of. At last, Chair Jay Powell was ready to let us move forward in a limited way. The story, as I heard it, is that Jay Powell was told by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at one of their biweekly meetings that allowing this project to move forward was “political suicide,” and she would not have his back if he let it happen. I wasn’t in the room when this conversation happened, so take these words with a grain of salt, but effectively this was the moment Libra was killed. Shortly thereafter, the Fed organized calls with all the participating banks, and the Fed’s general counsel read a prepared statement to each of them, saying: “We can’t stop you from moving forward and launching, but we are not comfortable with you doing so.” And just like that, it was over. One essential point is worth making here. There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions. That was the hardest part of this story for me personally. Not that we had failed, but that America, this country I immigrated to and became a proud citizen of because of its rule of law and value system, behaved in such a way for political reasons. It was a very tough pill to swallow. The bright side of the story, though, was the many learnings from this wild ride. By the end of the project, we had made so many concessions to get a thumbs-up that the whole design of the network became a Frankenstein of our initial ambitions. We also learned the biggest lesson of all, which is that if you’re trying to build an open money grid for the world—eventually moving trillions of dollars a day, designed to be here 100 years from now—you have to build it on the most neutral, decentralized, unassailable network and asset, which, hands down, is Bitcoin. And now this is what many of us who went through this scarring journey are building together at @Lightspark. And this time, we won’t stop until we get it done!

Introducing @Tempo. At Stripe, we care about high-throughput, low-latency payments use cases. As the use of stablecoins (and crypto more broadly) grows across Stripe, Bridge, and Privy, we found that existing blockchains are not optimized for them. For example, it's valuable for real-world financial applications that fees be denominated in a fiat currency that makes sense to the user, but existing blockchains denominate their fees in blockchain-specific tokens. Batch transfers are very useful in payments, but much less important in trading. Bitcoin does ~5 TPS; Ethereum does ~20 TPS, some (like Base and Solana) get to ~1k TPS, but Stripe peaks at >10k TPS. And so on. As such, we decided to incubate Tempo, a new blockchain, in partnership with Paradigm. We think of Tempo as the payments-oriented L1, optimized for high-scale, real-world financial services applications. Tempo is an independent company, with Stripe and Paradigm as the first investors. To ensure that Tempo serves a broad array of needs, we're excited to be working with Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa as initial design partners. We will start with an independent and diverse validator set, and plan to move towards permissionless validation. Tempo will have a built-in stablecoin AMM to enable platform neutrality with respect to different stablecoins, and Stripe itself will of course continue to work with many chains as first-class partners. We hope that Tempo makes it easier for things like payment acceptance, global payouts, remittances, microtransactions, tokenized deposits, agentic payments, and more, to move onchain. The Tempo team is 15 people today, led by the terrific @matthuang. If you're interested in building Tempo, get in touch! And if you're interested in partnering, reach out to partners@tempo.xyz.

1/ 🚨 Can crypto scale without losing its soul? @stripe and @circle are both building their own chain! The question isn't speed or functionality—it's openness. Are we building an open protocol for money, or branded rails?