Coupang and Woori Bank completed South Korea's first end-to-end KRW stablecoin payment settlement on Tempo, enabling real-time onchain transactions from checkout to merchant payout.
DeFi & Yields ·
Coupang and Woori Bank executed South Korea's first complete KRW stablecoin payment settlement using Tempo, a payments-focused Layer 1 blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. The transaction moved funds from customer checkout through to merchant payout entirely on-chain in real time, marking the first such end-to-end flow in the country.
Tempo is purpose-built for stablecoin transactions at institutional scale, with specifications including more than 100,000 transactions per second and sub-cent fees. The network allows gas payments in stablecoins themselves rather than a volatile native token, removing a friction point for merchants unfamiliar with crypto. Visa, Stripe, and Standard Chartered serve as validators on the network, which went live in March 2026.
The settlement represents an early operational use case for Tempo in South Korea, where regulatory clarity and institutional participation remain developing. Whether this payment flow will expand to regular merchant adoption, and what volume Coupang intends to process this way, remain unspecified.