foobar/@0xfoobar
Tempo Thoughts
Stripe is making a full-stack play from being the fintech middleman (passing point-of-sale data to settlement networks) into owning all three bits
- They bought Privy for 70m consumer wallets
- They bought Bridge for native stablecoin issuance
- They partnered w Paradigm to build a chain
Consumer (wallets) + Rails (stablecoin) + Settlement (blockchain). They even made an image
Great points from Nick (founder of the Agora stablecoin-as-a-service platform) about Stripe's need to move as fast as they can before their partners turn adversarial. Moving fast is hard to do as a $90 billion company, but Stripe is a cut above.
Consumer payments is the one domain where they're still at mercy of the card networks. And banks/cards are playing ugly now. In the last few months, Chase announced plans to absurdly overcharge, functionally cutting off fintech access to basic functionality such as querying someone's balance or running a charge.
Even the banks are getting debanked.
Payments are a great business because everyone is used to paying 2% interchange fees that get partially passed back to the consumer through opaque promos.
A modern payments system needs several features:
- instant finality
- guaranteed low fees
- high throughput
- privacy but also compliance
- reconciliation memo data
Ethereum does...none of this very well today. If you do really fancy cryptography and risk commingling with North Korea, you kinda get privacy. And you can put memo fields in transactions. But no reliable finality, fees, or throughput.
An L2 could solve the privacy problem by writing a new VM instead of using EVM, and it could beef up a massive sequencer for low fees. Doesn't solve the finality problem but maybe this gets fixed at EVM level by 2028 or so.
The real core issue that nobody has focused on is Ethereum speed of development. A single Paradigm developer (and team), Georgios Konstantopolous, has lapped nearly all of Ethereum's existing infra. Porto crushes 4337. Reth destroys geth. Many recent EIPs have been handheld by him.
What is the point of depending on a chain that itself depends on you?
Iteration speed matters when you're trying to overtake Visa. And Ethereum hasn't even solved basic problems like L1 execution throughput or L2 data availability throughput. Best-case scenario, another 2-3 years for these things to percolate into prod.
There are mild benefits at best to becoming an L2. Distribution advantages of a marginal fraction of a percent of Stripe's existing userbase. Some good vibes from the chain maxis, and more defensibility under President AOC 2028.
But these are simply dwarfed by the practical business realities of needing to win, today. Plus owning full value accrual. Don't give it away if you don't have to.
