DoorDash to Pay Delivery Workers in Stablecoins via Stripe's Tempo Blockchain

In brief

• DoorDash will use Tempo, Stripe's payments and stablecoin-focused blockchain, to pay workers and merchants in 40+ countries.
• The firm believes stablecoins can reduce payment settlement times and fees for foreign currency spreads and intermediaries.
• Shares of DASH are down around 2% on Tuesday following the announcement.

Publicly traded food, grocery, and retail delivery firm DoorDash will use Tempo’s payments and stablecoin-focused blockchain to pay its delivery workers with stablecoins in more than 40 countries. 

The firm, which has to deal with multiple currencies, payment rails, and regulatory requirements, is building on the blockchain network—which was incubated by payments giant Stripe and crypto VC firm Paradigm—to untangle the complexities of global payments. 

“Global payments is complex in terms of what the requirements are for any different country,” said DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang, in a statement. “Figuring out a way to provide solutions to the end customer that feel frictionless, while integrating with rails that are dynamic enough to handle the different requirements of different countries, is at the heart of the complexity.”

The firm’s infrastructure on Tempo will focus on the payout speed, cross-border cost, and transaction flexibility that stablecoins afford its business. 

“If we can get merchants and Dashers their money faster, and do that in a way that's affordable for them, that's a no-brainer for the entire ecosystem,” said Fang. 

Settlement with stablecoins can be done in just seconds, whereas typically merchants or Dashers—or those delivering food and products for the firm—have to wait for longer, varying settlement times depending on their country. 

Furthermore, foreign currency spreads and intermediary fees are reduced when operating with stablecoins. 

According to Fang, the firm chose to utilize Tempo instead of other stablecoin infrastructure options because of its “payments focus and enterprise readiness.”

“They have experience not only with crypto from a technology standpoint, but also from an enterprise readiness standpoint, thinking about what would make this technology work realistically for an enterprise like DoorDash,” he said. 

Tempo’s fledgling blockchain—which opened its public mainnet in March—has teamed with a handful of major firms for early design collaboration and payments use cases, including Visa, Shopify, and OpenAI.

The network, which is primarily payments and stablecoin-focused, additionally launched with an agentic payments protocol amid the rise of transactional AI agents. 

Shares in DoorDash (DASH) are down nearly 2% on Tuesday to a recent price of $186, but have jumped around 19% in the last month of trading. 

A representative for DoorDash did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.