Some Personal News

Guess what, Fintech Nerds? I got a new job.

I'm joining Tempo, the payments-focused L1 blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm.

I’m moving to an advisor role with Sardine (💙)to focus on Tempo as my full-time day job.

(And yes, I’ll still be doing Brainfood, Nerdcon, and Tokenized. Because I love this stuff.)

Let me tell you why I'm jumping into Tempo with both feet.

(PS. These views are so incredibly my own, and do not represent Tempo or any of its partners.)

Why Now?

We’re finally resolving the fundamental tradeoffs that have existed since the genesis block of Bitcoin.

Ten years ago, I was head of crypto R&D at a bank. People didn't believe this tokenization at scale was ever going to be possible. Through 2017, 2021 and today, there are still those who view it as a parallel world and not impacting mainstream TradFi. 

I believe that changes when we can resolve these fundamental tradeoffs.

• Performance vs. Decentralization 

• Distribution vs. Neutrality

• Compatibility vs. Innovation

Performance vs. Decentralization: The more you centralize the better your raw TPS performance becomes, but at the expense of platform lock-in. Many payments companies, banks and enterprises expressly do not want platform lock-in. But too much decentralization damages performance.

Distribution vs. Neutrality: Big companies have in-built distribution; they can instantly bring massive amounts of volume that dwarfs on-chain payments activity. But that’s a simple tech upgrade for them. The true benefit comes when any stablecoin, deposit or provider can operate on and validate for the network.

Backward Compatibility w/ TradFi vs. Innovation: TradFi needs KYC, reconciliation with core ledgers and features to manage risk. Onchain native innovators often operate without any of that. That becomes a blocker to liquidity coming onchain. But if you just copy+paste TradFi by centralizing you lose the promise of instant, 24/7 settlement.

Get any of these wrong, and you either build something that never goes mainstream or something that recreates the platform lock-in problems we're trying to solve.

This is the Opportunity to Change Payments Forever

I’ve worked in payments nearly my whole career, for a bank, in cards, cross-border, domestic, you name it. 

And as you know, I’ve been writing a lot about stablecoins lately because I see massive opportunity to make payments better for everyone in the industry.

• Stablecoins deliver 24/7, instant, global settlement, but only if you’re in that onchain ecosystem. 

• Closed networks from large banks deliver 24/7, instant, international settlement but only for direct customers.

If you could somehow combine the best of both worlds. TradFi tokenization and stablecoins on a single settlement fabric, the opportunity would be staggering. We would increase the velocity of money, meaning every business and consumer would become more economically active. No matter where they live. 

A focused L1 that resolves these trade-offs has the potential to build settlement infrastructure for the internet. 

And Tempo, I genuinely see the opportunity to make that real.

Payments need their own chain

To explain why I have five core insights, I need to share with you.

1. Payments need a lot of bespoke functionality. TradFi does a lot well. We can’t build stablecoin infrastructure for the sake of stablecoins. A dedicated chain needs quality of life features for managing fraud, FX, taxes, and reconciliations through ISO20022 (and other) messaging formats. IYKYK.

2. Payments need their own chain. General-purpose chains manage everything from lending to securities to memecoins. This means they lack a lot of the quality-of-life features that TradFi payments expect, and create settlement delays and fee volatility.

3. That chain needs to be ready for the world's payments volume. You need 100k + transactions per second, consistently, not variable. Ideally, it's able to guarantee sub-second finality, so it can suit true settlement use cases.

4. That chain needs fee consistency. Innovators aside, most payments companies don’t want to have to buy a volatile asset (e.g., ETH or SOL) to pay fees or think about MEV. A fee should be a fee, payable in fiat.

5. That chain needs to be credibly neutral. That means supporting any stablecoin, any infrastructure provider, and be decentralized enough so that it's resilient, no one party controls it, but also fast enough so you’re not waiting minutes or days for settlement finality.

The Opportunity for Tempo 

I saw in Tempo a team committed to balancing these trade-offs and building with these principles.

(The team isn’t announcing quite how yet because it’s still incredibly early)

And what a team. 

The opportunity to learn from people at the forefront of chain design, economics, payments, and technology was too much to resist.

I made a promise to myself earlier in my career that if I ever got to work closely with the Collisons and/or really impact the long-term infrastructure the industry uses, I had to jump at it. Today, that promise is fulfilled.

A Word on Sardine 💙

I'm joining Tempo full-time, which means I've stepped into an advisor role at Sardine.

I love the Sardine team. I cannot tell you how bittersweet it has been stepping back from day-to-day responsibilities there. You should work with that team. They ship unbelievably fast. Go look at their product again if you haven't in a while. It changes daily. It's an incredible team, an incredible product.

It was going to take something just ridiculous to move away from that, and this fit the bill of being just ridiculous.

The companies building on Tempo today are defining what finance looks like when it's built for a digital-first world from the ground up.

Payments need infrastructure built for payments. 

The internet needed native settlement infrastructure.

That infrastructure is here.

I think we've got a real shot.

And I’m going to give it everything I have to make it happen.

ST.

Learn more at tempo.xyz