Venkatesh Rao ☀️
152.5K posts
@vgr
Writing the Contraptions newsletter. Exploring protocols at https://t.co/Baom533Ax8. Substack is currently the best public place to find me.
What does long-term thinking look like in practice? Introducing Long Now Labs, a collaborative space to test, prototype, and build long-term tools. Lab Series 001 is a collaboration with the Protocol Institute to investigate three aspects of civilizational durability that are being radically reshaped by frontier technologies. -> Lab 001.1: Book of Time - An open call to submit a concept for a new way of marking, experiencing, or making sense of time. -> Lab 001.2: Epistemic Cycles - Seeking an individual or team to investigate historical patterns of technological disruption that broke down society's ability to discern truth. -> Lab 001.3: Interspecies Protocols - Exploring the protocols needed to support interspecies ecologies. If you are a designer, researcher, writer, or technologist interested in the deep future, we want to hear from you. Submissions are now open. Learn more about Labs and how to apply: na2.hubs.ly/H059wn90
Introducing Tempo: a payments-first blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. As stablecoins go mainstream, there’s a need for optimized infrastructure. Tempo is purpose-built for stablecoins and real-world payments, born from Stripe’s experience in global payments and Paradigm’s expertise in crypto. To ensure Tempo serves a broad array of needs, we’re excited to be working with a group of initial design partners, including: Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, Visa, and more. Tempo’s payment-first design includes: • Predictable low fees • Payments/gas in any stablecoin via enshrined AMM • Payments-first UX (dedicated payments lane, memos, access lists, etc) • Opt-in privacy • Scale (100K+ TPS, sub-second finality) • EVM-compatible, built on Reth Tempo eases the path to bringing real-world flows onchain, such as: • Global payouts, payins, and payroll • Embedded financial accounts • Fast and cheap remittances • Tokenized deposits for 24/7 settlement • Microtransactions • Agentic payments We’re building Tempo with core principles of decentralization and neutrality. Tempo will be a neutral platform with respect to stablecoins, allowing users to make transfers and pay gas fees in any stablecoin. The blockchain will be secured by an independent and diverse validator set, with a roadmap toward permissionless validators. We’re partnering with builders across fintech, banking, ecommerce, agentic finance, and more — if you’d like to build with us, get in touch at partners@tempo.xyz
end of an era
