Miami Beach, FL — After years of experimentation, crypto today boils down to two core uses: commerce and payments.
Speaking at a brand chat at Consensus 2026 in Miami, Tempo’s go-to-market lead, Dan Romero, said the industry is settling into a “barbell” shape, with speculative trading like Hyperliquid’s marketplace at one end and stablecoin-based payments gaining ground at the other.
“The things that have worked over the last five years are speculation and stablecoins,” he said. “In the middle, it’s a bit of a wasteland,” he added, describing a number of projects that have struggled to find product-market fit despite years of development and funding.
Romero speaks from experience. Before joining Tempo, he co-founded social crypto app Farcaster, which struggled to gain traction despite hefty venture capital checks and years of hype.
Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain backed by Stripe and Paradigm, positions itself firmly on the payments side of this divide. The network is built as a purpose-built layer-1 blockchain and focuses on business needs such as compliance and transaction control – features often lacking in public blockchains.
For example, companies can block interactions with certain wallet addresses, a feature aimed at reducing regulatory risk, Romero said.
This design reflects a broader shift in how large companies approach crypto. Instead of experimenting with tokens, many use stablecoins as backend infrastructure. “It’s plumbing,” said the director. “But businesses like plumbing if it’s better, faster, cheaper.”
Stablecoins are already gaining ground in areas such as money transfers. One example cited was cross-border payments between the United States and Mexico, with cryptocoins now accounting for a growing share of flows.
The next wave may come from Internet-native companies. Startups, especially those built around AI agents, are likely to default to stablecoins as the easiest way to move money globally, he said — just as Stripe simplified online payments more than a decade ago.
