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Ted, you know I love you, but nothing in either the announcement nor the website makes a compelling technical case for why an alt-L1 is needed. For example (from the announcement on X):
> Payroll transaction consistently failing when $trump launched
I have no idea what a payroll tx is in this context. At any rate, a token launch on Solana isn’t the stablecoin use case they’re designing for, so it’s not relevant.
> Aid disbursements taking days due to low TPS
Again, no idea what an “aid disbursement” is, but no tx takes days to process, not even on Solana’s bad hair days. This is just weird
> Projects delayed or cancelled due to six-figure upfront gas costs
2021 called, they want their gas costs back. You can achieve sub-cent gas costs on Ethereum L2s. That is a laughably obsolete argument
Now, from Liam’s webpage:
> Blockchains were not designed for stablecoins.Stablecoins are an emergent phenomenon of blockchains.
What? A stablecoin like USDC is literally just an ERC-20 token, which has been one of the most canonical standards since EIP-20 ten years ago, and exactly what chains like Ethereum were designed to transact!
> Meanwhile, blockchains themselves have always treated them as some kind of “application,” as opposed to the fundamental primitive that they should be designed for.
Again, what? See comment above. What does “application” in between quotes even mean!
> Tempo is an attempt to build those [blockchain] rails from scratch.
It’s literally built on Reth and is EVM compatible. Why inherit from this design if the idea is to build from scratch?
> Instead of focusing on trading, Tempo is being designed from the ground up to support real-world crypto use cases like remittances, global payroll, embedded accounts, agentic finance, and even microtransactions. It’s a blockchain designed for payments first, not as an afterthought.
What a pointless word salad. All of these things are literal tx on the blockchain. The purpose of the tx is orthogonal to the tx. And it’s not built “from the ground up” — see previous point.
> Importantly, Tempo is also being designed to be neutral and permissionless.
Is that why there’s a giant “Request access” button on their webpage?
> It is borrowing much of the Ethereum ethos and strategy of not enshrining or embedding any particular issuer, token, or centralized entity into the network.
No, it is pretty much building on Ethereum’s codebase (which is fine) while ditching the ethos of permissionlessness (see above), decentralization (that’s how they justify the high TPS), and credible neutrality (because they and their partners own the validator set). They do the literal opposite of borrowing from Ethereum’s ethos! But I guess in the post-truth world of 2025, we can claim that up is down and left is right, especially if backed by Paradigm.
Now let’s look at the tempo.xyz website:
> existing systems are either fully general or trading-focused. Tempo is a blockchain designed and built for real-world payments.
What does it mean for a blockchain to be “trading focused”? A tx is a tx. The point is just to update wallet balances.
> Process over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) with sub-second finality
So essentially a database with extra steps, got it. I guess it’s hard to get VC money with just an SQL product these days.
> Tempo is a neutral, permissionless blockchain open for anyone to build on […] Request access to our private testnet here.
You know which testnet doesn’t require permission? That’s right, Holesky.
> Who will run validator nodes? A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model.
Oh, right, so permissionlessness is now just a vague future promise once we get to the fine print. Until then, the trust-me-bro model prevails. But guys, it’s borrowing from the Ethereum ethos!
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