Christian Catalini, co -creator of the Libra Facebook project, warned Friday that Stripe’s tempo and the Arc de Circle could be commercially successful, but at the expense of the ideal of Crypto’s decentralization.
Released in 2019, Libra was the bold goal offer to create a global digital currency backed by a stable asset basket. The project promised to make payments as fluid as messaging, but caused an immediate reaction of regulators concerned with financial sovereignty, systemic risk and user privacy. By 2022, Libra, renowned Diem in an attempt to restore his image, closed and his assets were sold.
Catalini, who served as the main economist of Libra, used his thread of September 5 in X to visit the first commitments of the project and explain why they matter now. He said that the original open design, developed with the Harvard economist Scott Kominers, was reduced to a brief appendix after months of regulatory negotiations.
The first important retirement, he wrote, was to leave wallets without custody. Regulators insisted on a “clear perimeter”, which means a responsible intermediary that could contact, and penalize, if problems arose.
For supervisors used for intermediate finances, a world where users really had their own money was unmanageable. “For them, killing himself was not an choice, it was an obvious necessity,” he recalled.
Catalini pointed out irony: today, open networks are developing native blockchain compliance tools that could have addressed these concerns more effectively than traditional frameworks. But at that time, Libra was forced to strip decentralization, a change that described as an early sign of where the projects led by companies were directed.
His broader lesson was marked: “As long as there is a single throat to drown, or a committee of them, you cannot recover the system. Worse, any network with an architect lives in the borrowed time.”
Arc and Tempo at the Care Center
Catalini placed Stripe’s tempo and the Arc de Circle in that context. Both are new blockchains explicitly designed for payments, promoted as Stablecoin-First Infrastructure for companies and Fintechs.
Circle launched ARC on August 12, presenting it as a Capa-1 network specially designed for Stablcoin Finance. Unlike public chains that depend on volatile gas tokens, ARC USDC ARC for rates, offering predictable costs called dollars.
Integrates an incorporated currency exchange engine, promises a sub-second purpose and includes choice privacy functions. Circle said ARC will admit cross -border payments, credit systems in the chain, tokenized capital markets and programmable automated payments.
Only a few weeks later, Stripe and Paradigm announced the tempo on September 4, describing it as a chain of payments first capable of handling more than 100,000 transactions per second.
The network is compatible with EVM, it has a dedicated payment lane with support for notes and access lists, and allows users to pay both transactions and gas in any stablecoin. Stripe said the first design partners include Visa, Deutsche Bank, Revolution, Cloud, Shopify, Operai, Anthropic and Dordash.
Both projects were marketed as steps towards the stable payments. But for Catalini, they raised a deeper concern.
A revolution or a failed coup?
Catalini argued that chains led by corporations such as ARC and Tempo risk simply rebuilding the old financial system with new players in charge. Instead of moving card networks and banks, he warned, they could raise Fintech giants to the same domain position. “The throne will have new occupants, but it will be the same throne,” he wrote.
He also predicted that such networks would fracture geopolitically, with western and oriental blockages that are unlikely to share a single infrastructure directed by corporations. The result, he said, would be to compete financial empires instead of the first defenders of Crypto without border that they imagined.
Finally, Catalini described Stipe’s tempo as a “referendum about the ghost of Libra.” If it thrives, he suggested, he can show that Libra failed due to time, not to design, and shows that the dream of open money and without permission has been overcome by more pragmatic and centralized solutions.
