Squid is Live on Tempo | Bridge to the Payments Chain

Squid is live on Tempo, the payments L1 built for real-world settlement. Bridge and swap to pathUSD from 100+ chains on Squid.

Squid is Live on Tempo | Bridge to the Payments Chain
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March 18, 2026

Squid is Live on Tempo, the Blockchain for Payments

Squid is Live on Tempo, the Blockchain for Payments

TL;DR

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Tempo is a payments-first L1 built for real-world settlement, with stablecoin-based fees and account abstraction built in.
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Mainnet is live, with Mastercard, Klarna, Anthropic and Stripe merchants already building on it.
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Squid is live from day one, with cross-chain access to pathUSD from 100+ chains.

Most blockchains treat payments as an afterthought: bolt on a stablecoin, add a swap, call it done. Tempo did the opposite. They built a Layer 1 from the ground up, with one question in mind: what does a chain actually need to settle real money at scale?

Incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, Tempo’s mainnet launched today as a Layer 1 built for real-world settlement. Squid is live on Tempo from day one, connecting liquidity and enabling users to bridge or swap pathUSD across 100+ chains.

How Tempo is different

Tempo’s mission is to make stablecoin settlement work at scale, and this shows across the entire protocol stack. Consensus, execution, fees, token design, transaction flow - every layer is built around the demands of real payment systems.

Tempo runs Simplex BFT - the fastest BFT consensus protocol in its class, with a theoretical confirmation time of 400ms. That speed matters, but the bigger point is finality. For payroll, disbursements, or cross-border settlement, “probably final” is a liability. Tempo removes that uncertainty entirely: final means final.

Three choices make this finality concrete:

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No native gas token. Tempo users can pay fees with any supported stablecoin. No balance juggling, no holding a volatile asset just to move money.
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TIP-20. Tempo’s native token standard reserves dedicated blockspace for payment transactions. Your payroll run doesn’t compete with an NFT mint for block inclusion. Settlement costs stay predictable.
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Tempo Transactions. A new transaction type baked into the protocol that bundles stablecoin fee payment, batched calls, parallel nonces, fee sponsorship, scheduled payments, and passkey authentication. That’s the stack most payment apps spend months assembling. Here, it’s native.

For agents

Payment infrastructure stops being a human-only story as agents start paying for access, compute, and data. Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) turns any HTTP endpoint into something an agent can pay for on demand.

Here’s how it works:

1.
A client (agent, app, or human) makes a request
2.
The server returns a 402 with a payment challenge
3.
The client pays, retries with the credential, and gets the resource back with a receipt

Anthropic is already a design partner on MPP. This lets users and agents pay for any service on demand without accounts or signups, and lets companies monetize any endpoint without touching billing infrastructure, payment processors, or subscription logic. Agents can pay per API call without OAuth, billing accounts, or pre-loaded credits.

We're building a Squid adapter for MPP, which will allow agents to pay any MPP-enabled endpoint from any chain. More on that when it's ready.

Who’s already building

Mastercard, Klarna, Farcaster, MetaMask. Stripe already has merchants processing payments through Tempo. What Tempo adds is a new settlement layer beneath payment infrastructure that already works at scale. This is real payment flow shaping how stablecoins get used in commerce, not hypothetical demand.

Where Squid comes in

A payments chain is only as useful as the liquidity that can reach it. That’s where Squid comes in.

With Squid live on Tempo, users can bridge and swap into pathUSD, Tempo’s root quote token, from any chain in the Squid network. Squid’s widget already supports Tempo’s stablecoin-based fee model, so the flow works cleanly no matter where funds are coming from. Our solver is already onboarded, keeping liquidity competitive from launch.

From payroll settlement to MPP wallet funding, the routing has to just work. Tempo will need strong rails in both directions: money coming in, moving across, and moving back out again. Squid gives Tempo those rails, and our role only grows as more payment volume lands onchain.

Bridge to Tempo →