Stripe CEO Patrick Collison Explains Why Businesses Are Turning to Stablecoins

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said stablecoins are gaining adoption because they offer businesses faster, cheaper and more reliable payments than traditional systems.

His remarks came in a Hacker News thread on Sept. 5, 2025, one day after Stripe and Paradigm launched Tempo, a blockchain designed specifically for stablecoin payments.

In his first comment on the Tempo announcement thread, Collison wrote that Stripe had been “disappointed with crypto’s payments utility for much of the past decade.” He said the company’s view shifted as more businesses began using stablecoins for routine financial activity.

Collison pointed to Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure provider Stripe acquired in October 2024. He said SpaceX uses it to manage money flows in hard-to-reach markets, Latin American fintech DolarApp relies on it for banking services, and an Argentinian bike importer uses Stripe’s dashboard to pay suppliers.

“These businesses are not using crypto because it’s crypto or for speculative benefit,” Collison wrote. “They’re performing real-world financial activity, and they’ve found that crypto (via stablecoins) is easier, faster, better than the status quo.”

When asked whether people will eventually “pay with Tempo,” Collison said the blockchain is intended to function behind the scenes. He compared it to financial messaging systems like SWIFT or ACH, noting that consumers may not interact with Tempo directly but would benefit from its efficiency. He called “decentralized, internet-scale SWIFT” an imperfect but useful analogy.

In the answer to another question (about why businesses find crypto payments appealing), Collison outlined five reasons companies prefer stablecoins: near-instant settlement that reduces trapped liquidity, lower costs than card payments, greater reliability in cross-border transfers, fewer currency conversions and direct on-chain access to U.S. dollars.

He also rejected the idea that adoption is mainly regulatory arbitrage. Collison said stablecoins are now explicitly regulated in the United States under the GENIUS Act and in Europe under MiCA, and argued their appeal lies in solving the frictions of high-volume money movement.

In the Thursday announcement, Tempo was described as a “payments-first” blockchain built from the ground up for stablecoins, combining Stripe’s global payments experience with Paradigm’s crypto research. The companies said they launched the network to provide infrastructure tailored to real-world payment needs as stablecoins move into mainstream use.

Tempo’s design emphasizes predictable low fees, optional privacy and the ability to pay both transactions and gas costs in any stablecoin. It includes a dedicated payments lane with features such as memos and access lists, and is EVM-compatible, running on the Reth client. Stripe and Paradigm said the blockchain is engineered to process more than 100,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality.

The network is aimed at supporting global payouts and payroll, remittances, tokenized deposits that can settle around the clock, embedded financial accounts, microtransactions and what the companies call “agentic payments.”

Stripe and Paradigm also stressed governance. They said Tempo will operate as a neutral platform for stablecoins, secured by an independent and diverse validator set, with a roadmap toward fully permissionless validation.

The project launched with a broad roster of design partners, including Visa, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Nubank, Revolut, Shopify, OpenAI, Anthropic, Coupang, DoorDash, Lead Bank and Mercury.