MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — After years of experimentation, right this moment’s cryptocurrencies have converged on two core makes use of: transactions and funds.
In a hearth chat at Consensus 2026 in Miami, Dan Romero, head of market growth at Tempo, mentioned the trade is settling right into a “barbell” form, with speculative buying and selling like HyperLiquid’s market at one finish and stablecoin-based funds gaining momentum on the different.
“What has labored within the final 5 years is theory and stablecoins,” he mentioned. “It’s kind of of a wasteland within the center,” he added, describing quite a lot of tasks that regardless of years of growth and funding battle to search out product-market match.
Romero speaks from expertise. Previous to becoming a member of Tempo, he was a co-founder of crypto social app Farcaster, which struggled to realize traction regardless of heavy enterprise capital checks and years of hype.
Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain backed by Stripe and Paradigm, is firmly positioned on the funds aspect of that divide. The community is constructed as a purpose-built layer 1 blockchain, targeted on enterprise wants similar to compliance and transaction management, options which might be usually missing in public blockchains.
For instance, corporations can block interactions with particular pockets addresses, a function geared toward mitigating regulatory threat, Romero mentioned.
The design displays a broader shift in how giant corporations method cryptocurrencies. Many are adopting stablecoins as their backend infrastructure fairly than experimenting with tokens. “It is plumbing,” the chief mentioned. “However corporations like piping if it is higher, quicker and cheaper.”
Stablecoins are already turning into standard in areas similar to remittances. One instance was cross-border funds between the US and Mexico, the place crypto rails now account for an growing proportion of flows.
The following wave may come from internet-native companies. He mentioned startups, particularly these constructed round AI brokers, are prone to default to stablecoins as the simplest technique to transfer funds around the globe. Simply as Stripe simplified on-line funds over a decade in the past.
