"every company is launching a chain." and it's not even surprising anymore. stripe building tempo is like watching the final domino fall in what was always going to happen once payment companies realized they were essentially paying protection money to tether and circle for the privilege of using infra they could own themselves. i genuinely love stripe's approach to completely ignoring the crypto twitter discourse about decentralization and just focusing on what their customers actually want: cheaper, faster settlement with less friction. their fortune 500 clients don't give a singular shit about permissionless money or sticking it to central banks. they want predictable transaction costs and the ability to move money without waiting three days for ach transfers. stripe is basically offering them a private highway that still connects to the main roads when they need it, which is exactly what enterprise infra should be. all this goes to show distribution matters more than tech in the long run. ethereum has better tech than most of these corporate chains will ever have, but stripe already moves money for millions of businesses every day. they don't need to convince anyone to use their blockchain, they just need to make it incrementally better than what those customers are using now. liquidity follows users, developers follow liquidity, and suddenly you have an ecosystem that exists because it's useful rather than because it's ideologically pure. it's almost boring how practical this all is.