Stripe-backed Tempo makes first venture bet with $25 million investment in open-source dev team Commonware
Stripe-backed Tempo has made its first venture bet with a $25 million strategic investment in crypto infrastructure company Commonware. As part of the deal, the stablecoin-focused blockchain, Tempo, being co-developed by pedigree venture firm Paradigm and payments giant Stripe, will adopt the Commonware Library and become a core contributor to its ongoing development, according to Paradigm general partner and CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos in a Tempo blog posted Friday.“We were first impressed by the Commonware team’s approach to building consensus algorithms as a library, and we continue to be impressed by their continuous progress on the frontier of distributed systems,” Konstantopoulos said. “This is the start of a long-term collaboration between our two teams, focused on speed, simplicity, and open infrastructure.”Commonware provides a free, open-source library of modular blockchain primitives, or a so-called “anti-framework” that provides building blocks for customizable networks that are supposedly less opinionated than existing kits like Cosmos SDK or the OP Stack.“Tempo is directing their research towards mechanisms that unlock differentiated payment experiences and Commonware is supplying state-of-the-art primitives for everything else,” Commonware Patrick O'Grady wrote in an announcement. Last month, Tempo — armed with a $500 million warchest following investments from leading VCs like Thrive, Greenoaks, and Sequoia — acquired the team behind Ithaca, an open-source development firm supported by Paradigm and initially spun out to build the Layer 2 blockchain Odyssey. It also hired prominent Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist, the partial namesake behind danksharding.Commonware previously raised a $9 million seed round co-led by Haun and Dragonfly Ventures. Its angels include prominent figures across the blockchain sector, including Avalanche’s Kevin Sekniqi, Berachain’s Smokey the Bera, Cosmos’ Zaki Manian, and Solana’s Mert Mumtaz.The startup previously built Alto, a “minimal (and wicked fast) blockchain, to showcase the Commonware Library.Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.© 2025 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.