Building blockchains is the newest fad in fintech. The U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase has one. The online brokerage Robinhood announced its plans to launch its own blockchain in June, and its competitor eToro is considering its own. And, now, the fintech giant Stripe and the stablecoin issuer Circle are getting in on the action.
Stripe is developing what it calls Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain, according to a since-deleted job posting and sources familiar with the matter. And Circle said Tuesday morning that it’s building what it calls Arc, a blockchain designed for stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to underlying assets like the U.S. dollar.
There’s suddenly a flood of corporate chains, which begs the question: Why is seemingly every big finance company—especially Stripe and Circle—becoming a blockchain developer?
‘Own the full stack’
The answer for Stripe is simple, according to two stablecoin executives and one investor: vertical integration.
Through its $1.1 billion acquisition of the stablecoin startup Bridge, Stripe bought its own stablecoin and payments network. And after its June acquisition of the crypto wallet company Privy, it can give users accounts to store stablecoins. For, Stripe—which has made its name off of more traditional payments offerings like online checkout—adding a blockchain would amount to the creation a full-blown stablecoin ecosystem
“There’s an incentive for these large companies to own the full stack,” Rob Hadick, general partner at the crypto venture firm Dragonfly who regularly invests in stablecoin startups, told Fortune.
Stripe is making a big bet that stablecoins may be the future of payments. If much of its $1.4 trillion volume passes through stablecoins, it’s missing out on potentially millions in revenue
Blockchains, or decentralized networks like Ethereum or Solana, are akin to the Google Clouds or AWSs of the crypto tech stack. A decentralized fleet of servers process many of the transactions on a crypto app, and in return for lending their computing power, the owners of these servers receive fees.
Coinbase’s own blockchain Base, for example, has generated more than $130 million in fees since it launched in early 2023, according to data from DefiLlama.
“You want to control the economics,” Luca Prosperi, the cofounder and CEO of the stablecoin infrastructure company M0, told Fortune.
It remains to be seen, however, whether the multiplication of stablecoins and associated blockchains would result in countless coins and chains that normal consumers would have trouble navigating.
Stripe didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Defense vs. offense
For Circle, it’s a similar set of motivations.
The stablecoin issuer, which had a red-hot IPO in June, has its own token, USDC. The company also has its own burgeoning payments network. And it even has a service to let enterprise customers spin up their own crypto wallets. Still, the crypto company doesn’t have its own blockchain where it can process—and receive fees—for the volume of payments that pass through its services.
“They want to own that piece of money movement as well,” Bam Azizi, cofounder and CEO of the crypto payments startup Mesh, told Fortune, in reference to Circle.
But Stripe and Circle aren’t on the same footing. Stripe is one of the biggest private companies in tech. It’s a dominant payments processor whose revenue is already diversified—including $500 million in annual revenue run rate as of January from its Stripe Billing vertical.
Circle, on the other hand, derived more than 96% of its revenue in the second quarter of 2025 purely from the interest it earns on the U.S. treasuries backing its stablecoin. If interest rates go down, its entire business model could be threatened.
“We’re building a full stack, from the infrastructure layer to the stablecoin layer to the payment network layer,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said in a live interview with The Information about his company’s second-quarter earnings. (A spokesperson for Circle declined to comment further.)
That said, some think the newly-public company is playing catch up.
“Circle is being defensive and reactive,” said Hadick, the general partner at Dragonfly. “And Stripe is thinking about the future of payments and the future of their business, and being offensive and proactive.”
