Visa Becomes Anchor Validator on Stripe-Backed Tempo

Visa has joined the Stripe-backed Tempo blockchain as an anchor validator, operating an in-house node to validate real-time stablecoin payments alongside Stripe and Zodia Custody by Standard Chartered.

Visa announced the appointment Tuesday, saying the validator node was configured and will be managed internally after six months of collaborative engineering with Tempo’s team.

The three firms, which together process trillions of dollars in annual payment volume, will help secure and operate Tempo’s layer-1 network, which is built to support real-time and agentic commerce.

Visa expects to earn stablecoin rewards when it serves as the lead validator responsible for packaging transactions into blocks.

Tempo launched its mainnet in March and introduced the Machine Payments Protocol, an open standard designed to allow AI agents and automated systems to pay for services autonomously.

Stripe and Zodia Custody have been design partners since Tempo’s inception and are building payment flows on the protocol.

Tempo’s go-to-market lead Nischay Upadhyayula noted, “Visa processes billions of transactions across nearly every country in the world. That kind of operational rigor is exactly what we look for in validators on Tempo, built for payments at enterprise scale.” He added that additional validators will be announced in the future.

Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, wrote that the company had developed blockchain expertise over several years and is expanding that work by running critical infrastructure directly. “By operating a validator on Tempo, we’re extending Visa’s commitment to reliability, security, and trust into blockchain networks-supporting the development of stablecoin payment systems that meet the high operating standards our clients and partners expect,” he wrote.

Tempo was created by Stripe in partnership with crypto venture firm Paradigm. The network aims to position stablecoins as primary rails for instant payments between businesses, platforms and machine agents and to meet enterprise standards for high-throughput, low-latency payments.