# Dan Romero, five years at Coinbase, now pitches Tempo as a stablecoin chain for agents

Stabledash Live, a Stabledash show. Oct 20, 2026. Dan Romero.
https://live.stabledash.com/shows/the-live-show/episodes/tempos-agent-bet-why-ai-could-adopt-stablecoins-faster-than-Kd9BtWr0DXk

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.

## 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.

## Key takeaways

1. Dan Romero spent five years at Coinbase and five on Farcaster before joining Tempo with his team at the beginning of the year.
2. 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.
3. 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.

## Transcript

**Zach Fowler** (0:00)

This is gonna be a fun one. Dan, it's great to meet you. Thanks for joining us. Welcome in. How are doing?

**Dan Romero** (0:05)

Great. Thanks for having me.

**Drew Rogers** (0:08)

Excited to dive in. Good to meet There's

**Zach Fowler** (0:10)

too much to try to think through what we could talk about here, your your career, your background coming into to Tempo, Tempo itself. We really haven't even spent enough time unpacking all parts of that business and what what what you guys are doing there. There's so much. We will we will let you probably take this where you think is the most interesting because of this vantage point you have, but may... Maybe we start with a quick journey into into Tempo and into Stripe and, like, what that looks like for you.

I think we have... We we have maybe had a quick crossover while at Coinbase, but would love to start with a little background, and then we can dive into that.

**Dan Romero** (0:52)

Yeah. So my story quickly, I was early at Coinbase, was there for five years, kind of watched it go from a Bitcoin company to a crypto company. I was actually... The kind of last six months I was there is when Coinbase joined USCC. And so I I remember those discussions vividly is that people are like, why why would you want kind of like a dollar crypto? You know? Is this just Tether? And I I don't think anyone appreciated how big of a business stablecoins would end up becoming.

I spent five years then working on Forecaster, which is a decentralized social network. You know, could talk about that, but, didn't work out. And at the beginning of the year, I, along with the rest of my team, joined Tempo. And so I'm kind of leading up the business side of things and happy to talk all things standpoints.

**Drew Rogers** (1:39)

Yeah. What what did take, like, what did you take with with you from maybe going from Forecaster to Tempo? Because, you know, maybe we see it on the surface, and it looks like, hey. Complete pivot. This this segment didn't work, but I have to imagine there's some learnings that you're like, no. There's something here. It's just we haven't figured out, like, this this final form factor.

**Dan Romero** (1:59)

Yeah. So if I zoom back, I think Coinbase was a mix. We're very much a retail business and spent a lot of time thinking about consumers and crypto and and very much from an investment standpoint. But my role, I I managed all the bank relationships. Relationships. And so any fiat connectivity for Coinbase for the time that I was there, that was me. And in many cases, like, some of the banks that ended up kind of blowing up a couple years ago, like, I was the first customer of those banks.

And now, obviously, postgenius, plenty of banks are using crypto, and it kind of is a little bit more pedestrian in a good way. I... You know, ten years ago, finding a bank that would be willing to work with any crypto company was was pretty rare. I think the the thing that I was hoping with Farcaster was that we were kind of on the precipice of kind of a huge consumer boom for crypto and using blockchains for consumer use cases, and I don't think that's really played out. I I do think investment...

You know, some people say speculation, but I think, generally, consumers are are very much using crypto for kind of the invest... Testing side of things. But in terms of, building new kind of applications and games, I I don't think Web three really worked out. But I do think the thing that, like, clearly is working and and especially post Genius Act from last year is is stable courts.

And so I think the vantage point from Forecaster is we saw the the kind of, like, consumers and users using stablecoins for a variety of different use cases. And now there's tons of enterprise interest, and so it was a natural fit.

**Zach Fowler** (3:36)

Yeah. What what did the the moment for you with stablecoins? When did that happen? It sounded like you were at Coinbase during the the entrance of USTC into that business, you saw kind of the maybe the utility with with stablecoins within Forecaster, like, when did that kind of light bulb moment of, hey, stablecoins are maybe more than people realize, and what does it look like to really kind of go bet your career now on that? Like, what did that look like for you? And and why why do that specifically at tempo?

**Dan Romero** (4:09)

So I'll give, Zach Abrams, who I worked with at Coinbase credit. I didn't really see the kind of takeoff for stablecoins in in a pre genius world, and and I think, obviously, you did in terms of building bridge. I think early customers Yes. He did. They they figured out, okay. There are actual enterprises that wanna move money cross border, and don't wanna be, you know, subject to to kind of, like, the fluctuations of local currencies. And I I I think that's when it started to click for me.

But if if you remember the NFT boom, everything was priced in ETH, right, or or Solana. So I I don't actually think stablecoins is kind of a mainstream use case. It it... It's really picked up in the in the last year because of Genius. Right? So kind of... I think Bridge was early. Stripe obviously made the acquisition for that. But then post Genius, stablecoins are safe and banks are willing to use them. And so I think that has been the big takeoff. I also think just Stablecoin linked cards and earn programs. Yeah.

You just think two years ago, DeFi was very much a thing maybe you'd use, but any any mainstream consumer to use a stablecoin link card or or be thinking about a 7% APY, on chain, that's not something that was on anyone's radar. And I think what's cool about stablecoins now is that a lot of it, it's getting abstracted away from consumers. And so the kind of thing people have been talking about forever of crypto being plumbing Yeah. But having a consumer grade UX on top of it is actually happening. Okay.

**Drew Rogers** (5:41)

Bring us into this moment now because open open... You know, we talk... You mentioned Zach Abrams, Bridge, Stripe, and then now this this kinda felt like a tidal wave that all of a sudden hit us... Hit the next timeline with OpenStandard, him leading up that charge. Help us understand this ecosystem around OpenStandard, OpenUSD, the impact that it's having now in the Tempo Stripe ecosystem, and how really somebody...

I was just at SF Tech Week, maybe somebody that knows Stripe but doesn't know this kind of on chain capital stack, how they should think about how Tempo, Open Standard, Bridge, and Stripe all work together, and and how, really,

**Zach Fowler** (6:18)

Stripe is There are all these amazing pieces that Stripe is building or buying, and, like, I I would love your, like, the Dan perspective on how they stitch together.

**Dan Romero** (6:28)

Yes. I think it's worth highlighting Stripe, Bridge and Privy, kind of one thing. Right? So Bridge and Privy are owned by Stripe, part of Stripe's kind of set of core APIs around moving money, and and then, you know, that's... They're doing at scale, especially in the fiat world, but increasingly in the stablecoin world. Tempo and Open Standard are both individual, you know, kinda separate companies. And I think in the case of Tempo, Tempo is a blockchain, and we are trying to build a credibly neutral blockchain.

I think, naturally, a lot of people say, hey. Isn't this just Stripe's chain? I think Stripe's an important partner for us, and a lot of the initial enterprise customers that we're working with are because we're closely partnered with Stripe. But it's permissionless like any other blockchain. So anyone can go build on Tempo, and it just... Like Ethereum, like, we can't really do anything to in terms of... It is... You have self custody. The kind of core crypto primitives exist.

I think OpenStandard is its own company. I think people have used the term consortium, and I actually don't think that that's the case that, you know, ZAC is there. It is very much a company that is trying to grow their core stablecoin OUSD. And I think that that's really important because if you if you think about a consortium, it's a little bit of a volleyball in the middle of the court. It's like, who... Whose responsibility is it to grow it? It's like, no.

Zach and the team there are now waking up every day and trying to grow oUSD as a stablecoin. And I think what makes oUSD, OpenUSD, a a special stablecoin is the default economics are shared with companies that use it. And I think that that's important because if you kind think of the history of stablecoins, originally started outside The US for crypto trading that that didn't have access to banking rails.

And then I think you kind of had kind of a crop of stablecoins pre Genius that were a single company that were trying to grow it, and and I think they've been successful in doing so. But the economics, importantly, you know, when I say economics, it's it's the kind of interest that's sitting on, the stablecoins sitting inside the bank account. Right? Like, all all stablecoins are one one backed. And that interest belongs to the company rather than to the kind of people using it.

And I think that works fine in a world where you are mostly retail driven, but in a world where enterprises and and the types of enterprises that are interested in stablecoins today are, you know, at scale Internet companies, right, not just, crypto native companies. And so to think that they don't get to participate in the economics by default, given that they're providing all the growth and distribution, it it just doesn't work.

And so I think you you saw companies like Stripe, Shopify, Visa, Mastercard, who have massive distribution, say, hey. I I wanna actually have a stable coin where, by default, I I participate in the economics. Right? And and they're kind of, you know, the the ticky tack fees or or, you know, all all the stuff that has existed in stablecoins prior to OUSD, I think that's what OUSD is changing.

**Zach Fowler** (9:36)

Yeah. You... Dan, you mentioned the... And I just want to dive into this because for us, we genuinely... I'm I'm genuinely curious what the breakdown is, and I think a lot of... We spend all of our time talking with infrastructure builders, people starting and building companies, mainly in and around payments, and, like, understanding the difference when you say, like, Bridge, Privy, and, you know, we have this, like, Stripe side, and we have Tempo and Open Standard over here.

Like, what would you say to the the, you know, the skeptic or someone who's like, yeah, yeah, whatever. Like, this is just one big Stripe... Like, one big Stripe play? Like, what sort of barriers or governance structures... What does that actually mean practically? And where where are there maybe overlaps where leaders at Stripe are involved with Tempo? And, like, what does that actually look like behind the scenes?

**Dan Romero** (10:31)

Yeah. So we have dozens of crypto native infrastructure companies that, in in some cases, compete with Bridge and Privee integrated with Tempo today. So if you kinda wanna go use a different wallet provider or a different orchestrator,

**Zach Fowler** (10:44)

we have those. So the infrastructure layer is, like, totally open. Like, you will not, like, you know, block competitive infrastructure.

**Dan Romero** (10:53)

That's good. It's it's a permissionless public blockchain. So, yeah, I think you can just kind of view it that way. And I think that the the the more important thing for us is just can we actually get enterprise... Enterprises to use it? Because I I think that's the proof that people want. Do you have at scale stablecoin flows? Are they real world flows? Right?

I I don't think Tempo is going to compete for some kind of retail trading volume that has characterized crypto for the last decade or so, and there are chains that are phenomenally successful doing that. We're really focused on stablecoin oriented flows, which I think primarily are payments, but increasingly earn programs and and stablecoin linked debit cards. That whole ecosystem feels, like it's rapidly maturing in a way that you have global marketplaces that are starting kind of with, okay.

Maybe we'll use stablecoins as an additional payout mechanism, maybe in the long tail countries where your fiat connectivity isn't as good. Right? But then paying out to an embedded wallet that you can issue a debit card against it and then offer 5% in, by the way, dollars, not local currency that might be more subject to kind of inflation. I think it's a really appealing product for for folks. And so that is the area that we are very focused on. And like I said, I think we have a bunch of different providers.

There are, you know, kind of multiple DeFi protocols on on the network, Infrastructure providers both on the wallet side and the orchestration side. We have multiple stablecoins. Right? So Yeah. USDT... USDT 0, so Tether, natively issued on on Tempo. And so I I I think our goal is to give enterprise customers maximal amount of choice when they're thinking about how they wanna do things with stablecoins.

**Drew Rogers** (12:44)

Yeah. Dan, when we think about, like, these use cases, the stablecoins maturing, like, I almost see, like, two ends of the spectrum. There's the Revolutes of the world that are coming on chain, looking at issuing their own stablecoin that may leverage Tempo. And then there's the Eldorado's of the world that are, you know, newer businesses, newer neo banks, but kind of, you know, seeing really explosive growth in in emerging markets, and we just had Guillermo on the other week. When you... If...

I don't wanna say you have to pick one lane, but when you think about this from a business perspective, are you more interested in the... Bringing the Revolut's, bringing the larger institutions on, or building the next Revolut?

**Dan Romero** (13:23)

So I'm gonna say power that company. I I think they each provide different different kind of approaches. Right? So you have these enterprises that have massive amounts of scale that aren't using stablecoins, they're just getting their, you know, toe in water. Deal is a great example of this. Right? It's a big global, contractor payroll company. They're doing stablecoin payouts globally, and then they have an embedded program. They... They're ramping really fast.

So, you know, they weren't doing stablecoins at the beginning of the year, and and now, you know, they're on pace to to do pretty significant volume, here in q four. But I think it's worth pointing out is the majority of stablecoin volume today, especially if you if you kind of filter out trading use cases, they're Meovex, and they're companies that are uniquely enabled by stablecoins that allow kind of...

If you have an interesting new idea for fintech and and virtually all those are are, you know, kind of stable coin powered, and the ability to then rapidly add cards and earn programs, and then be global day one, I I think it's really appealing. And so I think we have teams focused on the enterprise side of things and teams focused on startup side of things. And then I think you mentioned at the beginning of, the interview, but AgenTic is yet another category, which I think is nascent today.

I think it's nascent broadly, and then it's especially nascent with stablecoins. But we we have our own kind of, like, agentic payment protocol that we coauthored with Stripe called MPP. And, MPP itself is is growing quite quickly because of these kind of agents like Instinct and Muse. Right? So they're they're able to use MPP to kind of do checkout, using Stripe link, which is kind of Stripe's consumer wallet, and that runs on kind of MPP.

And so for us, the ability to have the protocol that is powering this rapidly growing, category of AgenTic payments have the ability to then be stablecoin native, which that... That's the reason we built it, gives us the opportunity over the next twelve to eighteen months to to compete for those flows.

And I think, there's still a lot of work to do in terms of getting, stablecoin payments to be the the way agents do the payments, but it's promising that the protocols that the agents are starting to use, have Sablecoins natively built into them.

**Zach Fowler** (15:54)

Can you bring that down?... MPP lets agents pay for services on the web extensible to any payment method. Would you would you say this is like, when we when we look at the... All of all of the kind of parts of the the stack that we've mentioned, like, is one of the, like, more emerging, like, we're we're earliest probably here in this conversation with MPP?

**Dan Romero** (16:15)

Yeah. So I think if you just take overall stablecoin usage, trading by far, followed by neobanks, followed by the enterprises that are starting out, and then I think AgenTek is is small. But I think what's important is if you just saw kind of the growth of whether taking profits revenue or OpenClaw, just these things can move really fast. Yeah. And so we... We're we're committed to making sure that we are very much building for agents and thinking about tempo as a place for agents to pay.

And I think one kind of frame to think about is, you know, 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. So I I think that there is a lot of potential for Sablecoins in agents as compared to, you know, consumers adopting stablecoins as a kind of way to buy something on an ecommerce site. Right?

So I think a lot of the the kind of stablecoin adoption has been on enterprise payouts or these embedded finance programs that do a payout to a wallet with a stablecoin linked card and earn program. But I think for agents, their ability to... Know, in the same way they can use one programming language and then switch immediately to another one, very much easy for them to go from payment method over here to stablecoins. And so I think we think that that's the opportunity.

And like I said, still a lot of work to go figure out how to crack it, but we're we're really excited because I think that to me is the most asymmetric

**Zach Fowler** (18:21)

opportunity Yep. Stablecoins in your time. Yeah. We... I think we totally agree with that. Selfish question on You this are connected to probably a lot of these folks in in this conversation. If you met a rising star start up that was raising for the first time pre seed or seed, and they were like, you know, let's just say they had an idea that was perfect for this type of use case, they wanted to build on MPP, it was a really interesting use case.

Like, what what sort of investors or resources would you point them to to help them get started? What sort of, like, capital partners would you say actually get this opportunity that, whether they're working with Stripe or not, just like generally, you've found in your journey are great partners?

**Dan Romero** (19:08)

Yeah. I mean, I I don't know if I want to single out individual VC firms, because then the ones I don't single out will get mad. But I I think generally, I would say, look. I think early stage companies, YC, like, gets a lot of focus on AI, but I I know that there are folks that are working on stablecoin ideas in YC. Always a good place for people who may not have started a company. I think in terms of interest, basically, every crypto VC that was investing in Web three is now investing in stablecoins.

So I think if if you take the kind of group of crypto oriented VCs... And then I think AI oriented VCs where there's obviously a lot of, excitement, are very much thinking about payments as as a part of the monetization stack. I mean, even, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's talked publicly in, I think, the last couple of podcasts how Muse, one of the ways that they're thinking about monetization there is taking a cut of transactions. So I I think AI and stablecoins are very much converging.

And I think with the rise of personal agents, I would expect it to only get more intense over the next twelve months in terms of how many options are out in the marketplace and how capable they are. I think that that is gonna be an amazing opportunity, probably less on, I wanna go build the, AgenTic wallet and and kind of be the the next generation PayPal. I would argue that's probably, for those who already have distribution. But agents are really excited to go buy things for people. Right? And so if you... If...

The flip the flip side is, like, how can you make more stuff legible for agents? Right? You've seen probably some stories. Amazon is restricting accounts, other ecommerce. They're kind of leaning away from, like, I don't know if we want agents to be able to shop. You know, we have a big advertising business. We want you to come to our website.

And I think Paul Graham actually, had a pretty good tweet on this where he basically said, this is an opportunity, and he was specifically talking about Amazon, but I think it's it's broadly skate to where the fuck is going. Right? Everyone's gonna using an agent. How how can you make your product or service or or, you know, cater to folks who are using agents? And I think, a couple...

You know, Vercel and and Supabase, I think, are are two great examples of companies on on the kind of vibe coding developer side where when you ask a lot of code, go build me a website or go get me a database. Those companies absolutely question in terms of the agents just pick, those companies as kinda like the default. Right? And so that's what I would be spending time is, can I, you know, position a service that is agent friendly?

And then to the degree that you wanna be using stablecoins, in my view, it's like, one, there's no fraud. Two, you could be offering, you know, two or 3% cheaper, which, I don't know, maybe at the margin, agents, which are... They're hyperrational, will say, oh, I can use it from service x or y. This one's 2% cheaper, so we're use it. So I I I think that's some of the stuff that I'd be thinking about if I was building a new company right now. Yeah. Awesome.

**Drew Rogers** (22:04)

Thanks, Dan. I... We could probably dive deeper, and this is war... Probably Warren's an MPP agentic focused, deep dive, and we love especially demos. So if anybody on the... On your product team specifically in the agents world, open invite to them to come on the stream. We have a segment where we focus really... Go really deep on AI. Past few, we've sit down with head of, like, head of product at ZeroClick. That was a really great session. And we found our audience really likes talking...

Not that they don't love you, but they really like talking to the people building the thing. Not that you're not, but, like, the people hands on, and they can, go deep into that side. So open invite on that front, but thanks for coming on StableDash live today, and, we're gonna transition to to Bart now. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Dan. Good to meet you.