I just noticed something quite significant in the payments blockchain space. Tempo, the layer 1 that has been gaining traction since Stripe and Paradigm introduced it a few months ago, has just announced that Visa, Stripe, and Zodia Custody from Standard Chartered have joined as its first external validators.

What’s interesting here is that we’re not talking about small companies. Among these three, they collectively process trillions of dollars in payments every year almost everywhere. Their validator nodes are now responsible for verifying and finalizing transactions on the network, which greatly strengthens operational resilience for stablecoin-based settlements.

Visa set up its node entirely in-house after six months collaborating with Tempo’s engineering team. According to Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s crypto director, the company has spent years developing blockchain expertise and is now expanding that work by managing its own critical infrastructure. It’s also interesting that they act as validators on Canton, becoming one of the few traditional payments companies running blockchain infrastructure across multiple chains.

Validators on Tempo receive rewards in stablecoins for packaging transactions into blocks. What makes this notable is that Tempo plans to continue expanding its validator set with additional partners as they move toward fully permissionless validation.

This comes after Tempo raised $500 million in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks with a $5 billion valuation a few months ago, launched its public testnet in December with partners such as UBS and Kalshi, and debuted on mainnet in March together with the Machine Payments Protocol, an open standard for payments between AI agents co-authorized with Stripe.

Of course, there is skepticism in the community about whether an L1 backed by corporations can truly deliver on its promises without permission. That likely depends on how quickly they open participation beyond their selected partners. In any case, the institutional momentum here is undeniable.