Visa, Stripe and Zodia Custody by Standard Chartered become validators on Tempo's payments blockchain

Institutional payments heavyweights Visa and Stripe, along with Zodia Custody by Standard Chartered, have signed on as early validators for Tempo as it begins to expand beyond its initial small circle of operators.

Validators run the infrastructure that verifies, orders and finalizes transactions onchain — a role that lends itself to established, well-capitalized institutions capable of operating global, always-on systems. The new entrants fit the bill, collectively processing trillions of dollars of payments each year.

"Tempo is building payments infrastructure the way we think about it at Visa, purpose-built for moving value at scale," said Cuy Sheffield, Visa's head of crypto.

"Visa has spent decades running one of the world's most resilient payment networks, with globally distributed data centers, built‑in redundancy, and network‑level defenses that block tens of millions of attacks and billions in fraud every year. Bringing that operational rigor to Tempo's validator set is a natural next step as stablecoin payments scale," Sheffield added.

Tempo is an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 built for high-throughput payments and stablecoin settlement, particularly among larger institutions.

The project was incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, and launched on private testnet in September.

The firm was valued at roughly $5 billion following a $500 million Series A in October, with backing from investors including Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital and SV Angel.

More recently, Tempo has also pushed into more experimental areas such as agentic payments, or transactions initiated and executed by AI agents, alongside traditional use cases like stablecoin remittances.

Tempo has also begun attracting infrastructure and asset integrations, with oracle provider RedStone supplying FX and stablecoin pricing data and omnichain stablecoin USDT0 expanding to the network.