The Tempo blockchain that Stripe built to surpass Bitcoin’s five transactions per second (TPS) capacity publishes fewer 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, at an average of 5.1 TPS, a number that would shrink Tempo’s capacity, CEO Patrick Collison claimed in September.
Collison also boasted that Tempo would have a capacity of 10,000 TPS, which would put Tempo’s theoretical future soaring high above Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, there are now real-world figures to offset theoretical capabilities with on-chain transactions.
The actual usage of Tempo per Token Terminal and the company’s own Dune analytics is around 2.5 TPS.
Bitcoin publishes five TPS.
The underperforming blockchain raised $500 million in October 2025 at a $5 billion valuation from Thrive Capital, GreenOaks, Sequoia, Ribbit and SV Angel. The mainnet went live on March 18.
Paradigm, alongside Stripe, helped develop Tempo. Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang even leads Tempo as CEO.
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The figures after five weeks
Now that the main network has been in use for five weeks, Tempo reports 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.
Ethereum, on the other hand, generated $1.4 million in fees and $45 billion in total value.
Tempo’s decline in the chain is visible everywhere on the dashboards.
- The number of daily new wallets using Tempo peaked at 7,629 on March 19, 2026 and was only 1,749 on April 21, a drop of 77%.
- The number of daily contract deployments peaked at 3,060 on April 14 and fell to 863 a week later, a drop of 72%.
- Daily token transfer volume peaked above $9 million on March 17, and it is now down two-thirds.
- Tempo’s stablecoin DEX traded just $56,000 in 24-hour volume on Tuesday, a figure that is 95% below its peak and less than 0.001% of global DEX volumes. Tempo’s DEX would require one ten-thousandth decimal place to register a single natural number.
- Tempo’s daily DEX trades are under 2,000 today, down 77% from the March 20 peak above 18,000. Daily DEX volume on Tempo peaked at $1.1 million and has since fallen 93%.