Is Stripe's Tempo going to be a replay of Libra (Facebook's attempt at a payments solution)?
Libra turned into Diem which was wound down in 2022 (source). One of the people involved in Libra wrote this interesting thread about Stripe's new Tempo blockchain:
The only question is if Stripe can write a different ending for the movie Meta already showed us.
The thread's author believes Libra failed because
We had a bad case of Silicon Valley hubris—the belief that elegant code can simply wish away centuries of financial regulation. We announced our plan to reinvent money with the subtlety of a foghorn, giving every incumbent on the planet time to find their pitchforks.
He seems to think that Tempo may have a better chance at avoiding the pushback Libra received:
There is a simple story one could tell about why Stripe will succeed where Libra failed. A story of better timing, a better brand, and the wisdom of being a second mover. In this story, Tempo is the inevitable winner.
But, he also says it wasn't actually regulatory pushback that killed Libra: it was the big banks via Janet Yellen (citing a post by David Marcus, who is currently leading Lightspark).
He goes on to say that what really killed Libra was that it wasn't permissionless.
It's the same fundamental economic truth we identified at MIT almost a decade ago: the only thing that truly separates crypto from the systems it aims to replace is that it's permissionless. Full stop.
And the author of this thread doesn't think that Tempo is permissionless at all.
If corporate chains like Tempo and Arc succeed, it will mean the crypto experiment was not a revolution, but a failed coup. The backend technology would be different, yes, but the market structure would be eerily familiar.