payments chains I am not an expert on payments, but I have worked in 3/5 of the big banks in Canada, as well as several fintechs building payments rails and moving a lot of money with code — and most recently on high-perf chains which is to say I have some opinions on the concept of a high-perf chain for payments this will be a long post so I suggest clicking the grok button on the top right first, how can a blockchain have a payments focus in the first place? in the past, there have been several approaches one is to limit the programmability of the chain and not be Turing complete, this is what Stellar/XLM did many years ago this works but drastically limits what's possible onchain another is to permission the chain, this is what a lot of corporate chains have tried in the past, and it seems it's what Tempo will open with this works in theory but blurs the line between what a blockchain is vs. traditional databases a third option that hasn't really been done before is custom sequencing and blockspace rules to prioritize/reserve blocks for payments txn types this is actually quite interesting but relatively advanced from a design POV, and I suspect Paradigm is one of the very few teams that could actually help pull it off there are some loose parallels to existing chains, e.g., local fee markets on Solana (to some extent) and Sui fast path (though this is going away) but probably the closest thing is Hyperliquid's maker prioritization (where cancels get prioritized so the MMs have an advantage vs. takers) this **could** in theory work in a permissionless setting but would be extremely difficult to pull off in practice it's hard to list all the reasons why, but here are some obvious ones: an L1 is a set of computers that take turns in producing blocks, but where each of them verifies the blocks if you have a permissionless chain, the computers on the L1 can decide to ignore whatever rules you specified for example, if a payments chain is Turing complete and permissionless and successful — then presumably it will have a lot of funds flowing through it it's not a stretch to then assume that there will be many trading/defi related apps on top of it which then means that validators will want to prioritize these txns since they are much higher revenue (now you could argue the validators wouldn't do this because it's not long-term aligned but good luck with any matter involving social consensus when serious money is involved) whenever you have any serious amount of money in a permissionless environment, you will get a ton of these pvp incentive games being played out in perpetuity and given that a payments-focused chain in theory requires buy in from a lot of very large and compliant corporations, this will become a colossal headache this is of course not the only challenge, there are many others for example, security and censorship resistance a global payments network would be a colossal target for malicious actors and you need to defend against this perpetually on technical (let's say multiple concurrent proposers for censorship resistance), economical (yes, the token value and pvp money games really matter here), and social (stripe and the usa have many, many enemies) another challenge is the fact that payments are loss-leading for blockchains and roughly no validator will actually make money from them, which also directly affects the above two problems another is that due to the above, this is a highly competitive field and everyone would rather build their own thing vs. trusting that someone be "neutral" ironically, I think most of these issues are much easier to solve if the payments chain is an L2 vs. being an L1 for example, with a single sequencer, you can actually enforce specific sequencing rules, inherit security from a base layer, and not worry about the different types of incentives and attacks at the same time, if I were a payments giant and wanted to take over the world, I also would want to shoot for gold and try to do my own L1 for it because at my size, marginal bets won't yield in any meaningful multiple anyway, sorry for the word vomit, this is all to say that they're an interesting concept and could work in new ways but I think will require many, many years of extremely painful iteration the higher EV play for almost everyone will be to build on something like Solana or maybe as an L2 on Ethereum/Bitcoin/Celestia