Alea Research says the latest move around Open USD is not just another stablecoin story. In its view, it is an early sign of direct contact between legacy financial plumbing and crypto-native settlement infrastructure.
The report’s starting point is simple: markets now trade through the weekend, but the dollar systems that settle those trades still keep bank hours. Fedwire, T2, CHAPS and CLS shut down for 44 to 60 hours over a typical weekend. Tempo settles every hour, and one day after Open USD launched, $447 million was already running on the network.
Markets stay open on weekends, but dollar settlement still stops
According to the report, Fedwire settled $1.15 quadrillion in 2025, yet none of that money moved on a Saturday. That mismatch is the opening Tempo is trying to exploit.
Open USD launched on Sept. 30. The dollar stablecoin was introduced by a consortium that includes Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa. One day later, $447 million of its initial $490 million supply was already on Tempo.
Alea Research says Tempo is aimed at three places where dollars get stuck: weekends, borders, and bank-ledger systems that cannot easily pass value to the next counterparty.
The weekend gap is not going away soon. Fedwire is expected to add Sunday operations in 2028 or 2029, while Saturday will remain closed. Citing Tempo’s own work, the report says a bank can break even on a weekend stablecoin liquidity pool on Tempo at 1.5 basis points, compared with 1 to 3 basis points for tri-party collateral movements.
Open USD’s first wave of supply mostly landed there. On Oct. 1, its first full day of operation, $447 million of the $490 million in circulation was on Tempo. That pushed the network’s total dollar supply to $697 million, double the Sept. 29 level.
The report also points to cross-border payments, where performance remains well short of official targets. In 2025, only 2.2% of business-to-business payment services credited funds within one hour, versus the G20 target of 75% by the end of 2027.
Tempo’s pricing is close to zero. From the July 10 fee cut through Oct. 1, the median fee per transaction averaged $0.00003, with senders paying in stablecoins they already held.
The economics, the report says, sit not only in the transfer itself but also in float and adjacent services. Reserve income goes to issuers. For Open USD, that income goes to the partners that bring supply. Tempo makes money by selling API access and consulting, and it has no token.
A dollar that can settle on Saturday
The report points to a weekend in April, when trade.xyz used stablecoins to clear $1.5 billion in oil and equity index contracts while large-value payment systems were closed.
Those systems still run on weekday clocks. Fedwire opens at 9 p.m. New York time on the evening before each business day and closes at 7 p.m., leaving a 50-hour weekend shutdown. The euro system T2 closes for 48 hours. The pound system CHAPS closes for 60 hours. CLS, which settles foreign-exchange trades, closes for 44 hours.
Those schedules are changing slowly. The Federal Reserve will add Sunday operations to Fedwire in 2028 or 2029, while Saturday remains closed. The Bank of England will move CHAPS opening earlier to 1:30 a.m. from September 2027. Instant systems such as FedNow already run hourly, but each payment is capped at $10 million.
Tempo has built a banking pitch around that weekend shutdown. Its paper, Off-Hours Cash, models a bank converting wholesale deposits into its own stablecoin at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday. Clients then use that balance over the weekend for margin or settlement, and unused funds automatically convert back into deposits on Monday.
In that model, a bank with $500 billion in assets and a peak pool of $5 billion would face an annual cost of about $38 million while serving roughly $260 billion in flow. That works out to a break-even fee of 1.5 basis points.
The report says that figure is below or in line with every other weekend alternative it lists: 1 to 3 basis points for tri-party collateral movements, 5 to 20 basis points for weekend FX conversion, and 5 to 15 basis points for off-hours prime brokerage financing spreads.
Cross-border payments still wait on prefunded cash
The report argues that cross-border payments are slow because each corridor requires cash to be parked on the far side before payment can be made. Companies move about $23.5 trillion across borders each year and pay roughly $120 billion in transaction fees to do it. That excludes FX spreads and the cost of prefunding.
The G20 target for the end of 2027 is for 75% of cross-border payments to be credited within one hour and for average retail costs to fall to 1%. The Financial Stability Board’s 2025 monitoring found that 54.6% of wholesale services and 35.4% of retail services met the one-hour mark. Business-to-business services were at just 2.2%.
The average cost of sending $200 abroad was 6.5%, while the 2030 target is 3%. The Financial Stability Board expects global progress to remain unsatisfactory by 2027.
The first companies to feel that pain are the ones that pay out every day, and the report says several are already on Tempo. MoneyGram joined as Tempo’s first remittance validator node and settlement partner. Felix settles remittances on Tempo. Deel launched DLUSD, a stablecoin wallet for contractors, with Tempo as its only chain. Coastal Bank built a corridor that keeps messaging, screening and bank confirmation intact while moving only the value leg onto Tempo.
Reducing prefunding by even one day can free up working capital. The report estimates that if 1% of corporate cross-border flow required one less day of prefunding, about $644 million in working capital would be released. At a 4.5% cost of capital, carrying that balance would cost about $29 million a year.
One pool of cash across several markets
Tempo’s own research says speed is no longer the main point of differentiation between settlement networks. In a July paper, it described the real differentiator as liquidity mobility: the ability for the same cash to settle a repo trade, fund a cross-border payment, post margin at a derivatives venue and settle a tokenized securities trade without reissuing cash at each step.
On Alea’s Market Cap program, one of the paper’s authors, Borja Neira, said: 「Every generation of market infrastructure releases trapped cash, then traps it somewhere new.」
The report says current networks force users to choose between privacy and liquidity. Public chains spread about $40 billion of liquidity across more than 20 rollups. The largest private bank ledgers clear nearly $400 billion of repo trades a day, but that cash serves only that one market.
Tempo separates private execution from shared settlement. Tempo Zones run private transactions on parallel chains, while balances remain on a shared network. The first Zone is due to go live for a client in October.
Open USD also gives companies that move money a dollar of their own. Open Standard, founded by Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa, launched the stablecoin on Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo on Sept. 30. Bridge, a Stripe company, is the issuer. BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY hold the reserves. As of Oct. 2, those reserves were 88.3% Treasuries and 11.7% cash.
Most of the new supply flowed to Tempo. On Oct. 1, the first full trading day, 91% of Open USD in circulation was on Tempo, accounting for 64% of the network’s dollar stablecoin supply. Open USD grew by $424.3 million on launch day, while USDC, USDB and pathUSD on Tempo fell by $114.5 million, leaving a net increase of $309.8 million across the network.
Companies can mint and redeem Open USD on Tempo for free through Coinbase, Stripe and Visa.
That supply put Tempo between Arc and Plasma. It passed Arc on Sept. 30, two weeks after Arc mainnet launched. By Oct. 1, its size was about half of Plasma’s $1.45 billion.
Address growth continued after free transactions ended
During the free-transaction period, the network handled about 230,000 transactions a day. After fees began on May 19, daily volume fell to about 42,000 over the next month, but daily sending addresses held around 6,700.
By Oct. 1, the seven-day average had climbed to 11,338 sending addresses and 92,228 transactions.
Built around treasury teams
The report says Tempo starts with the work treasury teams do after money arrives. Senders can pay fees in any supported dollar stablecoin, and applications can sponsor those fees for users. Each transfer carries a memo for invoice matching, and issuers can set roles and transfer policies on their own tokens.
Tempo reserves about 94% of each block for payment transactions and leaves the remaining 6% for general computation.
Other stablecoin networks make different choices on fee assets. Arc, launched by Circle on Sept. 16, charges fees in USDC. Plasma charges fees in its own XPL token, while USD₮ transfers are free. On Tempo, every supported dollar stablecoin pays fees in itself, whether the issuer is a bank, a fintech company or Circle.
Tempo also launched with built-in distribution. Stripe, Visa and Zodia run validator nodes alongside MoneyGram. The validator set is permissioned today. Tempo has described a path toward permissionless validation, but it has not given a date.
The report says businesses on Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in 2025, up 34% year over year and equal to about 1.6% of global GDP. Stripe runs its own treasury operations on Tempo in more than 100 countries. Since Sept. 30, it has also offered Open USD to businesses on its platform, which can fund Stripe Treasury accounts from wallets on Tempo.
Who earns what when one dollar moves
The report breaks the economics of a payment into four groups.
- Validators receive all network fees, and those fees are intentionally low. From the July 10 fee cut through Oct. 1, the network collected $1,185 from 5.8 million transactions over 84 days.
- Liquidity providers keep 0.3% of the fee when Fee AMM converts it into a stablecoin acceptable to validators.
- Issuers and their partners earn the yield on reserve assets behind each stablecoin. Open USD distributes reserve income to partners after a small management fee.
- Tempo Earn launched on Aug. 12, allowing platforms to place idle balances into tokenized money market funds, onchain lending and institutional credit, while setting their own reward split with users.
Tempo itself sells surrounding services: a usage-based hosted API that includes fee sponsorship, and a stablecoin advisory team working with banks. It has not disclosed its take rate.
The report summarizes the model this way: senders or sponsors pay network fees in stablecoins; each fee goes to the validator that proposes the block; Fee AMM pays liquidity providers 0.3% of the conversion fee; issuers keep reserve income or distribute it to partners, as Open USD does; and Earn platforms choose their own reward split. Tempo’s revenue comes from API usage and consulting. There is no token, no buyback and no claim by holders on network cash flow.
For companies, no token means one less volatile asset inside each payment. For Tempo, revenue comes from services whose demand rises with the amount of money on the network.
Stablecoin payments are still small, but the surrounding pools are not
The report estimates that stablecoin payments run at about $390 billion a year, or 0.02% of the more than $2,000 trillion that moves globally each year. That figure covers payroll, supplier payments and remittances. Stablecoin transfer volume reaches $35 trillion annually, but most of that is trading and internal movement.
The pools around that number are much larger. Fedwire alone settled about 2,900 times that amount in 2025. FX markets trade $9.6 trillion a day. Corporate cross-border flows total $23.5 trillion, or 60 times the stablecoin payment figure.
Three fourth-quarter milestones
Tempo’s next three milestones all fall in the fourth quarter. The T12 upgrade is scheduled for mainnet on Oct. 13. It adds payment sessions for closed-loop stablecoins, allowing issuers to move tokens across chains through burn-and-mint without separate user approval.
The first Zone is due in October. Stripe plans a full rollout of Tempo payments in the fourth quarter. Tempo also listed two upcoming Open USD additions: access through Mastercard and support inside Tempo Earn.
Changes to bank settlement hours will move on a much longer schedule. CHAPS will begin operating at 1:30 a.m. from September 2027. Fedwire will add Sunday settlement in 2028 or 2029. The Bank of England has proposed Sunday settlement no earlier than 2029.
The container did not make ships faster
The report closes with a shipping analogy. Containers did not make ships faster; they removed the need to unload and repack cargo at every port, and trade expanded around that standard box. Alea Research says Tempo is trying to do the same for cash: let money move across markets on one network without being reissued at every stop.
Stripe’s treasury operations already run on Tempo, and the network held $447 million of Open USD on the stablecoin’s first full day. Fedwire, by contrast, will not add Sunday settlement before 2028 at the earliest. Tempo is already settling every hour of every week.
