From Stripe to Google: Corporate Blockchains Go Mainstream
From Stripe to Google: Corporate Blockchains Go Mainstream
Last time we wrote about how the public markets are finally catching up, now clamoring for crypto and blockchain companies and treasuries. While we are glad to see public investors waking up to our sector, it is easy—amid the chatter and the rapid-fire headlines—to lose sight of the quieter, structural shifts underway in finance.
As long-term private market investors, this is where our focus remains. We care about fundamentals, the use cases, and the rails being built beneath the noise.
I have recently returned from a week of meeting with family offices, institutions, and investment banks in New York City, and there is an undeniable buzz reminiscent of 2019 when Facebook’s (now Meta's) Libra promised a corporate-led crypto revolution. Libra’s bold vision of a global digital currency backed by major technology and financial institutions was quickly stymied by regulators, and many assumed no major company would dare attempt something similar again.
Fast forward to 2025: not only has Libra’s spirit been resurrected, it is spreading. Some of the world’s largest corporations—from payment processors to technology giants—are launching their own blockchains (more on those names below).
This month’s Letter from London explores why major companies are building proprietary blockchain networks, what they hope to gain, and how this movement could herald a new era in financial infrastructure.
Stripe’s Tempo — a New Consortium Chain, With Echoes of Libra
One of the most talked-about entrants in this corporate blockchain wave is Stripe’s newly announced blockchain network, Tempo.
In early September, Stripe unveiled Tempo as a high-performance, purpose-built Layer 1 for stablecoin payments. Developed with Paradigm, Tempo is designed for Stripe’s massive payments business—handling tens of thousands of transactions per second with sub-second finality.
In practice, Tempo is meant to support instant payment acceptance, global payouts, remittances, and even machine-to-machine “agentic” transactions—all in digital dollars and other stablecoins. It allows fees to be paid in stablecoins (not the native token) and includes features like an automated market maker for currency neutrality. And because it is EVM-compatible, existing Ethereum developers can build on it easily.
Patrick Collison (Stripe’s CEO) has argued that even the fastest existing blockchains do not meet Stripe’s needs for throughput, reliability, and compliance. By launching a proprietary chain, Stripe controls the core infrastructure: it sets the rules, optimizes performance, and ensures compliance is built in at the protocol level.
Importantly, Stripe is not going it alone. The project is structured as a consortium, reminiscent of Libra. Stripe and Paradigm have assembled heavyweight partners—Visa, Deutsche Bank, Shopify, OpenAI, Anthropic, Revolut, Nubank, and others—as early design collaborators and likely validators.
By involving a diverse group of institutions, Stripe signals that Tempo aims to be open and neutral rather than a closed, Stripe-only chain. Paradigm’s Matt Huang stressed that Tempo is being “built with principles of decentralization and neutrality,” launching with distributed validators and transitioning over time toward permissionlessness.
It is hard not to feel déjà vu. In 2019, Facebook rallied a similar roster of partners for Libra, only to meet fierce regulatory resistance. Lawmakers recoiled at the idea of Silicon Valley controlling a global currency, fearing it would undermine sovereign money and financial stability. Libra, later rebranded Diem, never got off the ground—despite hiring seasoned regulators and nearly securing Swiss approval.
There are differences in Tempo’s architecture that suggest it should have more success that Libra. Tempo does not create a new global currency; it uses existing regulated stablecoins. More crucially, it launches into a far clearer regulatory environment, with stablecoin legislation now in place (e.g. Genuis Act). Whether regulators will accept it remains to be seen, but Stripe’s approach seems to be more pragmatic than Facebook’s was.
For us, the decision by one of the world’s most important fintech and payments players to firmly cement itself as a blockchain leader has not gone unnoticed.
Why Corporates are Launching Blockchains
We have long argued that large companies would eventually stand up their own blockchains. That prediction is now playing out across industries:
Coinbase launched its Base network. Other major exchanges have followed suite.
Circle unveiled Arc, an open L1 for stablecoin finance.
Sony is building Soneium to power gaming and entertainment.
Google Cloud is piloting its Universal Ledger for institutional finance.
Robinhood has hinted at a blockchain for tokenized equities.
Their initiatives differ, but the logic rhymes. Why launch a blockchain?
Cost control. Owning the rail lets you bypass third-party networks and compress fees.
Compliance and control. Permissioned access, KYC/AML, and tailored privacy can be designed into the protocol.
Competitive differentiation. A custom chain can be optimized for payments, gaming, or settlement in ways competitors cannot easily copy.
Ecosystem development. Opening rails to outside developers and partners creates long-term platform value.
Monetization. corporates can capture or lower the ‘take rate’ that payment service providers or banks levy, by hosting their own transaction networks.
The direction is clear: settlement itself is becoming the prize.
Case Study: Coinbase’s Base
Coinbase’s Base demonstrates the financial payoff. Built on Ethereum’s Optimism stack, Base scales transactions cheaply and quickly while anchoring back to Ethereum for security. For Coinbase’s 100+ million users, it is a seamless on-ramp into Web3.
The payoff has been immediate. By mid-2024, Base ranked first among Ethereum Layer-2s in transaction count and second in total value locked. In its first full quarter, it delivered approximately $50 million in fees—roughly 8% of Coinbase’s revenue at the time. Each swap, transfer, and application built on Base now accrues to Coinbase’s bottom line rather than to outside validators.
Fast forward to 2025, and Base has become central to Coinbase’s effort to build recurring, non-trading income. In Q2, subscription and services revenue—which includes Base’s fees, custody, and stablecoin income—reached $655.8 million, about 45% of total revenue. This shift away from volatile trading fees toward infrastructure income provides Coinbase with stability, cash flow, and strategic leverage.
The lesson is simple: infrastructure can be monetized. Running the rail is better than renting it.
The View from London — Blockchain as Financial Infrastructure
Stripe, Google, Circle, Coinbase, Sony, Robinhood—the list grows longer each quarter. And more importantly, the blockchain’s launched by these corporates are not experiments or proof of concepts.
Just as every company built a website in the 1990s and a mobile app in the 2010s, we believe nearly every major enterprise will soon operate—or plug into—a blockchain as part of its standard toolkit. Some will be public, some permissioned, others consortium-run. Collectively, they will become the financial substrate.
The pieces are falling into place. Technology has scaled to mission-critical capacity. Regulation, while imperfect, is clarifying. And the market is steadily adopting tokenization and 24/7 ledgers for payments, settlement, and asset trading.
Looking forward, it is not a stretch to imagine a world where almost every transaction runs across blockchain rails—stablecoins and securities zipping across corporate and public chains alike. Stock exchanges settling trades on shared ledgers. Supply chains and trade finance moving in real time.
As we have written before, software has finally come to finance, through blockchain as infrastructure.
There will be failures, silos, and inevitable regulatory pushback. But the trajectory is unmistakable. For investors, the takeaway is both simple and bold: blockchain is becoming integral to global financial architecture. Just as no business today can function without the internet, no large enterprise tomorrow will be able to ignore blockchain.
The convergence of traditional finance and blockchain is no longer theoretical. Those who build and leverage these networks today are positioning themselves to be the dominant platforms of tomorrow’s economy.
Thank you for reading, and until next time.
Mitch Mechigian
Partner, London
About Fifth Era
We are entering a period of unprecedented innovation we call the Fifth Era, and every industry and business will be dramatically impacted. We focus on investing into these new innovations. Fifth Era specializes in investment strategies which construct portfolios of hard-to-access funds and direct investments through our investment strategies - AI Access and Blockchain Coinvestors. Fifth Era's investment strategies are now in their 12th year and to date we have invested in a combined portfolio of 1,500+ companies and projects including 80+ unicorns. In the US we are a SEC registered investment advisor, in the UK a FCA appointed representative and our funds are registered in Switzerland. Visit us at www.FifthEra.com to learn more.
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