Tempo is designed around payments from the ground up. Stripe co-incubated it with Paradigm for stablecoin settlement. Gas fees are paid in stablecoins so users don't need to hold a separate token. Tempo built a new token standard called TIP-20 that reserves a portion of each block for payment transactions. Gas spikes from other activity don't affect settlement costs. Consensus runs on Simplex BFT with deterministic finality so there are no probabilistic rollbacks on payroll runs or customer disbursements. Stripe already has merchants processing payments through it. It doesn't need to convince anyone to adopt crypto. It just needs to move the settlement layer underneath. Testnet launched with four company-run nodes and there's no public timeline for going permissionless. But the pieces are there.(Delphi Digital)