"Getting The Fortune 500 Onchain is The Primary Goal"

**Dan Romero** (0:00)
As someone who's been in crypto for a decade, I view it as a huge success if we can go get the Fortune 500 to start doing stuff in crypto. And if people want to call us CorpoChain or not decentralized enough or not cyberpunk enough, I know what the people here believe, and I think that getting these companies on chain is the primary goal.

**Sam Ewen** (0:28)
All right, welcome to CoinDesk Spotlight. I'm Sam Ewen. We are here with Dan Romero. Dan Leeds go to market for Tempo. Tempo has got a tremendous amount of buzz since it launched, and Dan, I know you and I spoke briefly at Consensus a few months ago. So I'm really excited to dive in. You guys have been announcing a flurry of things, so it's pretty exciting time over there.
I wanted to start with you though on, you have this amazing five-year arc where you're building Farcaster, which is a decentralized social network. Then you move over to Tempo, which is really about building stable coin payment rails. On the surface, those look different, but I'm wondering if there's actually a through line that really connects the dots for you on your time at Farcaster and what you're now doing at Tempo.

**Dan Romero** (1:11)
Yeah. And I think the best way to think about it is I started at Coinbase. So I'm 12 years into crypto this year. And when I joined Coinbase in 2014, I was assuming that the consumer use cases of crypto were just around the corner.
That didn't end up happening. And Coinbase, I think, has built a phenomenally successful business. I'm glad to have played a big part in the early days. But the kind of thinking around 2020, when I was thinking about Farcaster was, okay, we have the kind of speculative financial component that that's clearly working in crypto. What else can we do with these public blockchains?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:51)
You can do things like identity.

**Dan Romero** (1:53)
You know, NFTs is an example. So Web3, right?
It didn't play out. And I still think it could happen in the future, but I think it's just a timing thing. And clearly, we're still very much in the financial infrastructure deployment phase. I do think one thing that came out of all that is the infrastructure has scaled. So when we started building Farcaster in 2020, privy didn't exist and a lot of the other kind of components, L2s weren't a thing really. And so fast forward to 2026, infrastructure is there, right? It can handle ridiculously fast transactions per second across all these leading different blockchains. And then the other big thing that changed, and this is the reason I ended up at Tempo, was I think the market split. So you have kind of referred to as a bar bill where you have speculation on one side and then you have stable coins on another. And they have interplay, right?
Stable coins was born out of necessity for kind of doing crypto exchanges. But post genius act in the United States, I think stable coins is a very different category. Still crypto, but appealing to a very different set of use cases. And frankly, it's a different motion than I think most of the crypto stuff, right? You're dealing with larger enterprises' payments, which is, you know, it's easy to kind of just say, oh, stable coins is the same thing. But there are a lot of things that come with payments that you don't really think about when you're kind of growing up completely in crypto.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:19)
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**Sam Ewen** (3:43)
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I love that you mentioned your early time at Coinbase. I know our parent company CEO, Tom Farley, often has credited you with opening his eyes to crypto when he was at the New York Stock Exchange.
So you've been doing this long enough to really, I think, have a wider purview. I'm really interested in what you just said about Web3. And because I've been having this discussion with people I meet, which is like, is it time to kind of retire that phrasing? Primarily because we're seeing, to your point, this amazing market's infrastructure layer being built. I look at stable coins and RWAs really is just digitized value. And we're now just playing with like internet native value, as opposed to something that has to go through legacy systems. I guess when you started Atempo, was part of the excitement for you about really entering an era that finally we're like the expectation of the time and the technology had sort of met each other. And is that sort of part of the excitement about building something that is really focused on now bringing more consumers in, but also enabling companies to sort of act at kind of the frontier models of what finance should be?