News linked to both this project and an event.
According to The Block, Visa, Stripe, and Zodia Custody—a digital asset custody firm backed by Standard Chartered Bank—have become the first validators on the Tempo payment blockchain. Tempo is an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 blockchain designed specifically for high-throughput payments and stablecoin settlement, primarily targeting large institutions. Validators are responsible for verifying, ordering, and finalizing on-chain transactions, and are typically mature organizations with global operational capabilities. Tempo was incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, launched its private testnet in September 2025, and closed a $500 million Series A funding round in October at a valuation of approximately $5 billion. Recently, Tempo introduced its “Agent Payments” protocol—executed by AI agents—and has attracted infrastructure integrations including RedStone.
According to The Block, renowned startup accelerator Y Combinator has completed its first fully stablecoin investment, paying $500,000 in USDC to prediction market startup Totalis via three on-chain transactions on Solana. The funds are held in custody by Ramp, a financial operations platform. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan stated that the accelerator will make stablecoin payments available to all YC-backed startups—not limited to crypto-related companies. Totalis plans to use Ramp to execute both stablecoin and fiat transactions simultaneously and to pay credit card bills from its stablecoin account.
According to The Block, AlphaTON Capital has announced plans to raise $43 million through a strategic partnership with Vertical Data Inc. to expand its AI compute infrastructure; the transaction is expected to close in Q2 2026. AlphaTON CEO Brittany Kaiser stated that the funding will be used to deploy additional NVIDIA B300 GPUs, with the core objective of advancing the convergence of AI, digital assets, and confidential computing—and scaling up the platform’s overall compute capacity. On the business front, AlphaTON not only holds a substantial amount of TON tokens as corporate treasury assets but also actively participates in building infrastructure for the Telegram and TON ecosystems, with key investment focus areas including Cocoon, Telegram’s decentralized AI platform. Background-wise, AlphaTON was formed through the restructuring and transformation of former biotech public company Portage Biotech Inc., which had previously focused on cancer therapy research; the company completed the spin-off of its cancer therapy subsidiary in February this year.