The Tempo blockchain that Stripe built to outperform Bitcoin’s capacity of five transactions per second (TPS) is publishing less than three.
Seven months ago, Stripe pitched its new blockchain on the premise that existing blockchains had insufficient capacity for its institutional payment flows.
Bitcoin (BTC) miners have added about 160 million transactions over the past 12 months, averaging 5.1 TPS, a number that Tempo’s capacity would dwarf, CEO Patrick Collison claimed in September.
Collison also bragged that Tempo would have capacity for 10,000 TPS, levitating Tempo’s theoretical future high above Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, there are now real-world numbers to settle theoretical capacities with on-chain transactions.
Tempo’s actual usage per Token Terminal and the company’s own Dune analytics is approximately 2.5 TPS.
Bitcoin publishes five TPS.
The underperforming blockchain raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in October 2025 from Thrive Capital, GreenOaks, Sequoia, Ribbit, and SV Angel. Its mainnet went live on March 18.
Paradigm, in addition to Stripe, helped develop Tempo. In fact, Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang runs Tempo as its CEO.
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The numbers after five weeks
Now five weeks into mainnet operation, Tempo reported approximately 5,600 daily active users. The chain generated a whopping $205 in fees over 24 hours and held $3 million worth of crypto in total value locked.
Ethereum, in contrast, generated $1.4 million in fees and $45 billion in total value locked.
Tempo’s on-chain decline is visible everywhere on its dashboards.
- Daily new wallets using Tempo peaked at 7,629 on March 19, 2026, and sat at just 1,749 as of April 21, a 77% drop.
- Daily contract deployments peaked at 3,060 on April 14 and fell to 863 a week later, down 72%.
- Daily token transfer volume peaked above $9 million on March 17, and it now runs two-thirds less.
- Tempo’s stablecoin DEX cleared just $56,000 in 24-hour volume on Tuesday, a figure 95% below its peak and less than 0.001% of global DEX volumes. Tempo’s DEX would need a ten thousandth decimal point to register a single natural number.
- Tempo’s daily DEX trades sum to less than 2,000 these days, down 77% from the March 20 peak above 18,000. Daily DEX volume on Tempo peaked at $1.1 million and has fallen 93% since.