With all due respect to Matt, the notion that Tempo will in any way be neutral is a fantasy. First, the very fact that he is billed as the "project lead" while sitting on the board of Stripe, a corporation that is clearly central to this effort, and being a GP at a VC firm that will likely be heavily invested in it, is a problem. That screams "not neutral." (counterintuitively, the better Matt is at being project lead, the less neutral the chain will be). Second, he is conflating the chain being permissionless with it being public. Public means "anyone can transact or issue on it" and permissionless means anyone can be a validator. As stated by Matt, Tempo will start as a permissioned chain. A permissioned chain will never be public. To wit: will North Korea be able to freely issue tokens on Tempo? What if Do Kwon decides to launch an algorithmic stablecoin on there from jail? And then Putin says "we will route payments for our sanctioned oil being sold on the black market via stablecoins on Tempo"? Will the permissioned, known, and regulated corporations who run the validators be OK with all of this? Will the general council of Visa declare "Yes: we are clearly violating many US Federal laws and risk losing our licenses and possibly going to jail, but the docs said Tempo is a public blockchain, so we will process all of these transactions?" I don't think so. As I argued yesterday, permissioned networks do not provide validators the plausible deniability required for a chain to be neutral: Third, no permissioned network has ever successfully transitioned to being permissionless. Hyperliquid is trying, but they have a long way to go, and are a special use case because it's mostly an app-chain, one whose primary margin asset still remains "elsewhere", something that might be OK for perps but not for payments. Tempo will have an even harder time transitioning, because per the announcement, there is heavy involvement from various payments incumbents, most of all Stripe. To believe that the network can transition to permissionless is to believe that corporations that accrued hundreds of billions of dollars in value over recent decades by owning a network will now launch a new network that they own (because it's permissioned) but then magically decide to give all the power and profits that come with it away, quite possibly to competitors that will try to destroy their incumbent businesses. That is highly unlikely. As @ccatalini pointed out yesterday, even Libra's original plans to someday decentralize were pushed to the back burner rather quickly. And Facebook did not have an incumbent payment business to protect. Stripe, Visa, Nubank, etc. all do. Y'all really think they'll give it away? This has never happened before in the history of shared corporate infrastructure - which is what Tempo will be on day one. Every other shared corporate infrastructure (Visa, Mastercard, CME, NASDAQ, SWIFT, The Clearing House, etc.) has gone in the opposite direction - it has centralized power and become more permissioned and censorable over time. This is literally why Satoshi invented Bitcoin. And I say this not as an ideological opposition to Tempo, but as an observation of what will be debated in the conference rooms of every potential issuer, user, etc. Y'all really think Mastercard will jump all over a permissioned network controlled by Stripe and Visa? Or Amazon or Walmart - fresh off their endless lawsuits against Visa and Mastercard for being oligopolies? Lastly, it's hard enough to bootstrap a PoS chain from scratch because of the "rich get richer" problem of staking. Ethereum is still the only PoS chain that's achieved a diverse token-holder set that can deem it "a neutral L1." It got there by: a) having a tiny premine by modern standards and b) being PoW for years. Tempo will start with a massively concentrated token holder set and permissioned validator set. To argue it'll easily become neutral is to make a whole bunch of assumptions that are contrary to the ideals and lived experience of this industry.