Stabledash Live · · 23 min

Tempo’s Agent Bet: Why AI Could Adopt Stablecoins Faster Than Shoppers Ever Did

With Dan Romero

Key takeaways

  • Dan Romero spent five years at Coinbase and five on Farcaster before joining Tempo with his team at the beginning of the year.

  • Romero says stablecoins took off after the GENIUS Act made them safe for banks, and Tempo is targeting enterprise payment flows rather than retail trading volume.

  • MPP, a payment protocol Tempo co-authored with Stripe, gives Tempo a chance to compete for agentic payments over the next 12-18 months, he says.

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Summary

The former Coinbase and Farcaster executive says stablecoins have moved from trading to enterprise payments, and that AI agents are the next opening.

Dan Romero was at Coinbase for five years and watched it "go from a Bitcoin company to a crypto company." After five more years on Farcaster, he and his team joined Tempo at the beginning of the year. In a Stabledash Live interview he described a stablecoin market moving from trading toward enterprise payments and agents.

From skepticism to plumbing

At Coinbase, Romero managed all the bank relationships and fiat connectivity. He recalls that people early on asked whether a dollar crypto was "just Tether," and says no one saw how big stablecoins would become. In his view, things changed after the GENIUS Act: "stablecoins are safe and banks are willing to use them."

He says stablecoin-linked cards and earn programs have gone mainstream, and that stablecoins are increasingly hidden from consumers as plumbing with a consumer-grade UX on top.

“I've thought a lot about this at Coinbase. Even ten years ago, we were thinking about micropayments with Bitcoin when we were trying to figure out crypto use cases. One of the reasons I think a lot of the kind of micropayments on the Internet, you know, pay to access an article, they they didn't work because consumers are creatures of habit, and they basically only use cards. Right? And card... Cards have, like, kind of fixed cost for small payments and economics. And so I think the opportunity with agents is agents are arguably infinitely patient. And so their ability to adopt a new payment method, if it provides some benefit, whether it's better, faster, cheaper, you get cash back on it, some type of rewards points.”
Dan Romero

A neutral chain beside Stripe

Romero describes Tempo as a credibly neutral, permissionless blockchain. He calls Stripe an important partner, but says anyone can build on Tempo. Stripe owns Bridge and Privy, yet dozens of crypto-native infrastructure companies, some of them competing with Bridge and Privy, are integrated with Tempo today. Tether's USDT is natively issued on the chain.

He says OpenUSD stands apart because its default economics, the interest on reserves, are shared with the companies that use it rather than kept by a single issuer.

Enterprise flows first

Tempo is not competing for retail trading volume, Romero says. It is focused on payments, earn programs and stablecoin-linked debit cards. He points to global marketplaces using stablecoins for payouts in countries with weak fiat connectivity, and to Deal, a contractor payroll company that was not using stablecoins at the beginning of the year and is ramping fast.

Betting on agents

Romero calls agentic payments nascent, and says they are the smallest use case today, behind trading, neobanks and enterprises. Still, MPP is growing quickly thanks to agents like Instinct and Muse, which use it for checkout through Stripe Link. He argues that agents, unlike consumers stuck on cards, can switch payment methods if one is cheaper or offers rewards.

His advice to builders is to make services agent-friendly. With stablecoins, he says, "there's no fraud" and services could be two or 3% cheaper.

Romero's case is that the GENIUS Act brought stablecoins into enterprise use, and that agents could be the next wave. He expects AI and stablecoins to converge further over the next twelve months, and says Tempo is committed to being a place where agents pay.

Stripe, Tempo, Bridge, and Coinbase come up most.

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