Christian Catalini, co-creator of Facebook's Libra Project, warned on Friday that Stripe's Tempo and Circle's arc could be commercially successful, but at the expense of Crypto's decentralisation ideals.
Released in 2019, Libra was a bold bid in Meta to create a global digital currency backed by a stable basket of assets. The project promised to make payments as seamless as messaging, but sparked an immediate backlash from regulators concerned about financial sovereignty, systematic risks and user privacy. By 2022, Libra had been renamed Diem to reset its images – was closed and its assets were sold.
Catalini, who served as Libra's chief economist, used a September 5th thread on X to revisit the project's early compromises and explain why they are important. He said the original open design, developed along with Harvard Economist Scott Cominers, was reduced to a short appendix after months of regulatory negotiations.
The first major retreat he wrote was abandoning non-radical wallets. Regulators have insisted on “clear boundaries.” This means a responsible intermediary who can contact and be penalized if a problem arises.
For supervisors, the world where users truly have their own money was out of control because it was used for interim finance. “For them, killing independence was not a choice, it was a clear need,” he recalls.
Catalini focused on irony. Today, Open Networks is developing blockchain-specific compliance tools that have been able to address these concerns more effectively than traditional frameworks. However, at the time, Libra was forced to remove decentralization. This is the change he described as an early signal where corporate-led projects are headed.
His wider lessons were tough: “As long as you have a single throat to suffocate, or a committee of those, you can't really rewire the system. What's worse, the network with architects lives on borrowed time.”
Spotlight arc and tempo
Catalini placed the tempo and circle arcs of Stripe in that context. Both are new blockchains explicitly designed for payments, advertised as Stablecoin First Infrastructure for businesses and fintech.
Circle launched ARC on August 12th, presenting it as a Layer-1 network built for Stablecoin Finance. Unlike public chains that rely on volatile gas tokens, ARC uses USDC as fees, providing predictable dollar-induced costs.
It integrates built-in forex engines, promises sub-second finality and includes opt-in privacy features. The circle said the ARC will support cross-border payments, on-chain credit systems, tokenized capital markets and programmable automated payments.
A few weeks later, Stripe and Paradigm announced their tempo on September 4th, describing it as a payment-first blockchain that can process over 100,000 transactions per second.
The network is EVM compatible and features dedicated payment lanes to support memos and access lists, allowing users to pay both transactions and gas on any Stablecoin. According to Stripe, early design partners include Visa, Deutsche Bank, Revolut, Nubank, Shopify, Openai, Anthropic, and Doordash.
Both projects were sold as steps towards mainstream stubcoin payments. But for Catalini, they raised deeper concerns.
A revolution or a failed coup?
Catalini argued that corporate-led chains such as ARC and Tempo Risk are simply restructuring the old financial system that is responsible for new players. Instead of banishing card networks and banks, he warned that the fintech giant could be promoted to the same advantage. “The throne has new residents, but it will be the same throne,” he wrote.
He also predicted that such networks would be geopolitical fractures, and that it would be unlikely that Western and Eastern blocks would share a single, business-driven infrastructure. As a result, he said he was a competing financial empire, not a defender of the Borderless System Crypto, which early supporters of Crypto had envisioned.
Ultimately, Katarini described the striped tempo as a “referendum on the ghosts of Libra.” If it flourished, he suggested, it might prove that Libra failed because of timing, not because of design – and that the dream of open and unauthorized money was driven out by a more practical and centralized solution.
