Visa has announced the launch of its validator node on Stripe's purpose-built payments blockchain, Tempo.
Tempo is incubated by Paradigm and Stripe and is designed to enable high-throughput, low-cost global transactions for any use case, including machine payments, according to data from their official website: tempo.xyz.
Visa has launched a validator node on the Tempo blockchain, taking a direct role in verifying and processing transactions on a network designed for real-time stablecoin payments.
Visa said the node is operated in-house using its own infrastructure and was developed over six months working with Tempo’s engineering team, positioning the company as an “anchor validator” alongside early participants including Stripe and Zodia Custody.
The role places Visa in the transaction validation layer, where it helps order and confirm payments while supporting network security and performance during the network’s early phase. - Cointelegraph report
Visa's validator node launch is a development that carries several high-conviction signals about where crypto, payments, and global finance are heading.
Traditional payment giants are moving down the stack, from using blockchain rails to helping run them and the reason is quite simple: the finance leverage point has shifted.
With blockchain being the new finance infrastructure layer, these traditional players have one choice alone and that's restructuring their businesses accordingly.
With a business like Visa, becoming a validator for a payments blockchain is one of many decisions that need to be executed.
Blockchain for payments are gaining relevance amongst traditional businesses because the blockchain infrastructure layer is increasingly considered a durable financial layer for the future of all economic activities.
The inherent design of blockchains demands that businesses become protectors of the infrastructure through distributed consensus protocols, accessible through running validator nodes.
This means that when a business such as Visa joins a network, it's a signal that the infrastructure holds significant promise to replace centralized financial systems.
Visa validating on Tempo suggests an acknowledgement that legacy rails are slower and more expensive for some settlement use cases.
It also means that traditional payments giants are racing for the stablecoin stack. Several players are building stablecoin/blockchain payments rails simultaneously.
I think that these developments will prove valuable in coming years.
It's understandable to question them given that we are dealing with traditional centralized businesses, whose entire world is being directed threatened by decentralized blockchains, but competitive is healthy.
In the case of blockchains like Tempo, with TradFi faces like Stripe behind it, I think we're looking at a good source of liquidity through the onboarding of the existing markets using the traditional payments rails of these companies.
We can expect more businesses to begin accepting and issuing payments in crypto/blockchain assets such as stablecoins, effectively making global or mass onboarding easier.
This is something not many quite grasp but global adoption begins with a vast number of businesses accepting and issuing payments in these assets and these developments from TradFi giants in this market is probably the easiest way to get there.
