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What is Tempo?

Tempo is a Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin payments at scale. Incubated by Paradigm and Stripe, Tempo is built on Paradigm’s high-performance Ethereum client Reth and uses Simplex BFT consensus for sub-second, deterministic finality. It is fully EVM-compatible, allowing developers to use familiar Solidity tooling like Foundry and Hardhat. Tempo is often referred to as a “stablechain” because its entire design is optimized around stablecoin-based payments rather than general-purpose computation.

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Key Features of Tempo

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No Native Gas Token

Unlike virtually every other blockchain, Tempo has no native cryptocurrency. Gas fees are paid directly in USD-denominated stablecoins (USDC, USDT, etc.) via a Fee AMM that converts user-selected fee tokens to validator-preferred assets. This means value fields in transactions and traces behave differently than on other EVM chains — there is no native ETH-like asset being transferred.

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Sub-Second Finality

Tempo produces blocks every ~0.5 seconds with deterministic, immediate finality powered by Simplex BFT consensus. Once a block is committed, it is final with no re-orgs or probabilistic finality.

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Ultra-Low Fees

Transaction costs target under $0.001 per transaction, with dedicated payment lanes that reserve blockspace for payment transactions to ensure low fees even during congestion.

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TIP-20 Token Standard

Tempo extends ERC-20 with its own TIP-20 standard, adding currency identifiers (USD, EUR), gas payment capability, a 32-byte memo field for invoice IDs and metadata, reward distribution mechanisms, and compliance policy integration. TIP-20 events are indexed on Dune under tip20_tempo.* tables alongside standard ERC-20 tables.

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Built-in StablecoinDEX

A native decentralized exchange optimized for stablecoin conversions and tokenized deposits. The StablecoinDEX is decoded on Dune under tempoexchange_tempo.stablecoindex_* tables.

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EVM Differences Impacting Data

While Tempo is EVM-compatible, several design choices affect how data appears compared to standard EVM chains:
  • No native token: The value field in transactions and traces is not meaningful in the traditional sense since there is no native gas token. Token transfers happen via TIP-20/ERC-20 events instead.
  • TIP-20 events: In addition to standard ERC-20 Transfer and Approval events, Tempo tokens emit TIP-20-specific events like TransferWithMemo, RewardDistributed, QuoteTokenUpdate, TransferPolicyUpdate, and SupplyCapUpdate.
  • Gas paid in stablecoins: Gas fee fields (gas_price, max_fee_per_gas) denominate fees in stablecoins rather than a native token, which affects gas.fees computations.

Tempo documentation

Access full documentation for Tempo, including architecture, token standards, and developer guides.

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Data Catalog

Logs

Smart contract event logs on Tempo.

Blocks

Information on processed blocks, highlighting Tempo’s sub-second throughput.

Transactions

Data on transactions, illustrating Tempo’s ultra-low-cost stablecoin payments.

Decoded

Decoded transaction data for in-depth analysis of contract executions including the native StablecoinDEX and Uniswap deployments.