Christian Catalini, co -creator of Facebook’s weight project, warned on Friday that Stripe’s pace and Circle’s bow could succeed commercially, but at the expense of Crypto’s decentralization ideal.
Libra was launched in 2019 and was Meta’s bold bid to create a global digital currency supported by a basket of stable assets. The project promised to make payments as seamless as messages, but it triggered immediate setback from regulators who were concerned about financial sovereignty, systemic risk and users’ privacy. By 2022, the weight – renamed Diem in an attempt to reset its image – was closed and its assets sold.
Catalini, who served as Libras’ main economist, used his September 5th thread on X to revise the project’s early compromises and explain why they matter now. He said the original open design, developed with Harvard economist Scott Kominers, was reduced to a brief appendix after months of regulatory negotiations.
The first major retreat, he wrote, was to give up non-varying wallets. Supervisory authorities insisted on a “clear circumference”, which means a responsible intermediary they could contact – and penalties – if problems arose.
For supervisors used to intervening funding was a world where users really had their own money, unmanageable. “For them it was not a choice to kill self -insurance, it was an obvious necessity,” he remembered.
Catalini noted the irony: Today, open networks are developing observational tools resident in Blockchain that could have treated these concerns more effectively than traditional frameworks. But at that time, the weight was forced to remove decentralization, a change he described as an early signal of where business -led projects were on the way.
His wider lesson was sharp: “As long as there is a single neck to strangle – or a selection of them – you can’t really re -discover the system. Worse is, any network with an architect lives on borrowed time.”
Bow and pace in the limelight
Catalini placed stripes tempo and circular arc in that context. Both are new blockchains designed explicitly for payments, promoted as stablecoin-first infrastructure for companies and fintechs.
Circle launched ARC on August 12 and presented it as a LAG-1 network custom built for stablecoin finance. Unlike public chains that depend on volatile gas packs, ARC uses USDC for fees and offers predictable, dollar-denomined costs.
It integrates a built-in currency engine, promises finality during a second and includes opt-in privacy features. Circle said ARC will support cross-border payments, onchain credit systems, tokenized capital markets and programmable, automated payments.
Just weeks later, Stripe and Paradigm revealed Tempo on September 4th and described it as a paying-first blockchain capable of handling over 100,000 transactions per day. Second.
The network is EVM compatible, has a dedicated payment course with support for memos and access lists and allows users to pay both transactions and gas in any stablecoin. Stripe said early design partners include Visa, Deutsche Bank, Revolut, Nubank, Shopify, Openai, Anthropic and Doordash.
Both projects were marketed as a step towards mainstreaming of stablecoin payments. But for Catalini, they raised a deeper concern.
A revolution or a failed coup?
Catalini claimed that business -leading chains such as ARC and Tempo Risk simply rebuild the old financial system of new players responsible. Instead of displacing map networks and banks, he warned, they could raise fintech giants to the same dominance position. “The throne wants new residents, but it will be the same throne,” he wrote.
He also predicted that such networks would blast geopolitically, with western and eastern blocks that would unlikely to share a single commercial infrastructure. The result, he said, would be competing economic empires rather than the boundless system Crypto’s early advocates imagined.
In the end, Catalini described Stripes Tempo as a “referendum on the ghost of the weights.” If it thrives, he suggested, it can prove that the weight failed due to timing, not design – and show that the dream of open, permitted -free money has been overtaken by several pragmatic centralized solutions.
