Tempo Launches Joint Product with Knova to Help Financial Institutions Launch Tokenized Payments Without Replacing Existing Systems

Tokenized payments are moving from crypto-native experimentation to regulated financial infrastructure. Tempo is partnered with Knova to help institutions make that leap safely, quickly, and operationally.

For years, stablecoins and tokenized money have promised faster settlement, broader reach, and programmable payment flows. What has changed is that the conversation is no longer theoretical. Major payment companies, banks, regulators, and infrastructure providers are now actively building the rails and rules needed for digital money to operate at institutional scale.

Tempo is part of that shift. Incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, Tempo was introduced as a payments-first blockchain purpose-built for stablecoins and real-world payments, with design input from leaders across financial services, commerce, AI, and global technology. At the same time, the broader market is moving quickly: large financial institutions are exploring bank-issued stablecoins, payment companies are expanding stablecoin settlement and card programs, and U.S. regulators are building a formal framework for payment stablecoin issuance, reserve management, audits, custody, risk management, and supervision.

Tempo is also addressing one of the most important challenges in institutional blockchain adoption: how to preserve the transparency and programmability of on-chain settlement without exposing sensitive payment information to the entire network.

That is where Tempo’s Zones offering comes in.

Zones are designed to provide privacy-preserving environments for on-chain activity, allowing institutions and counterparties to conduct transactions with greater confidentiality while still benefiting from Tempo’s payments-focused infrastructure. Rather than forcing every payment detail into a fully public execution environment, Zones can help create more controlled transaction contexts for sensitive workflows, such as bilateral settlement, treasury operations, institutional transfers, and regulated payment activity.

This approach reflects an important reality of financial markets: institutions need shared infrastructure, but they do not necessarily want every participant to see every commercial detail. Payment amounts, counterparties, account relationships, pricing, liquidity positions, and internal workflows can all be sensitive. On-chain privacy can help institutions adopt tokenized payments without treating confidentiality as an afterthought.

That momentum is exciting, but it also creates a new challenge for financial institutions: how do you launch tokenized payment products without rebuilding your operating environment from scratch?

That is where Knova comes in.

Tempo and Knova are excited to partner to deliver a joint product solution for financial institutions looking to launch tokenized payments without replacing existing systems. Tempo provides secure, privacy-preserving settlement rails, including the ability to support more confidential on-chain payment environments through Zones. Knova provides the operational layer: on-premises controls, multi-system workflow orchestration, and audit-ready reconciliation. Together, the solution is designed to help institutions test and launch new payment use cases on Tempo while staying compliant, maintaining control, and streamlining operations from one control plane.

The next phase of tokenized payments is operational

The first phase of digital asset adoption was about proving that assets could move on-chain. The next phase is about proving that financial institutions can operate those flows inside real businesses, under real controls, with real accountability.

For banks, payment providers, and enterprises, launching tokenized payments is not just a question of connecting to a blockchain. It means answering a much longer list of operational questions:

1. How do payment instructions move from existing systems into tokenized rails?
2. How are approvals, business logic checks, sanctions screening, and internal policies applied before funds move?
3. How do teams reconcile what happened on-chain with what happened in treasury, core banking, ERP, custody, and reporting systems?
4. How do institutions maintain auditability without forcing operations teams to monitor yet another fragmented workflow?
5. How can counterparties benefit from shared settlement infrastructure while keeping sensitive transaction details private?

These are not edge cases. They are the difference between a proof of concept and a production payment product.

Privacy is especially important as tokenized payments move into institutional settings. Public blockchains can provide powerful transparency and verifiability, but financial institutions also operate under confidentiality obligations, competitive pressures, and strict information-sharing requirements. A bank may need to prove that a payment settled correctly without revealing its entire transaction history to every network participant. A corporate treasury team may want programmable settlement without exposing supplier terms or liquidity positions. A payment provider may need to coordinate activity across counterparties while limiting visibility to the parties that actually need it.

Tempo’s Zones offering is designed to help address that tension. By creating more private, controlled environments for on-chain activity, Zones can give institutions a path to use blockchain-based settlement while preserving the confidentiality expected in financial markets.

The regulatory environment reinforces that reality. The GENIUS Act established a U.S. regulatory framework for payment stablecoins, while proposed Treasury rules would apply Bank Secrecy Act and sanctions compliance obligations to permitted payment stablecoin issuers. That means successful tokenized payment products will need more than fast rails. They will need privacy, controls, reconciliation, governance, and operational traceability built in from day one.

A control plane for tokenized money movement

Knova sits alongside an institution’s existing systems and provides a unified control plane for orchestrating transactions across traditional and tokenized environments.

With Knova, institutions can connect payment workflows across core systems, treasury platforms, custodians, wallets, banks, blockchains, and internal ledgers without replacing the systems they already use. Knova helps normalize activity across those systems, enforce business and compliance rules, automate multi-step workflows, and reconcile on-chain and off-chain records into an audit-ready view.

In the context of Tempo, that means institutions can more easily move from “we want to explore tokenized payments” to “we can launch a controlled payment workflow in production.”

It also means institutions can incorporate privacy into the operating model rather than treating it as a separate technical concern. Knova can help coordinate the workflows around activity conducted through Tempo’s Zones, including approvals, policy checks, system updates, monitoring, and reconciliation. The institution can maintain a consistent operational process even when some activity occurs in a more private on-chain environment.

A bank may want to test 24/7 settlement between institutional clients while limiting transaction visibility to the relevant counterparties. A payments company may want to offer stablecoin-enabled cross-border flows without exposing commercially sensitive payment data. A fintech may want to embed tokenized money movement into a customer-facing product while maintaining clear controls over who can access transaction information. An enterprise may want faster settlement for global suppliers or treasury operations without publishing sensitive business relationships on a public ledger.

In each case, the payment rail is only one part of the equation. The institution also needs a way to control, monitor, approve, reconcile, and report the full lifecycle of the transaction — including activity that may be intentionally shielded from broad network visibility.

Knova provides that operating layer.

Why this partnership matters

Tempo brings purpose-built settlement infrastructure for stablecoin payments, along with an approach to on-chain privacy that can better align blockchain-based settlement with institutional confidentiality requirements. Knova brings the controls and orchestration institutions need to operationalize those payments inside existing environments.

That combination matters because the biggest bottleneck in institutional adoption is rarely interest. Financial institutions are interested in tokenized payments. The bottleneck is implementation.

Most institutions cannot rip out core systems to launch a new payments product. They cannot ask operations, compliance, risk, treasury, and technology teams to run critical workflows from disconnected tools. They cannot afford months of custom integration for every rail, wallet, custody provider, or chain they want to test. And they cannot launch production payment flows without a complete record of what happened, who approved it, what controls were applied, which parties could access the relevant information, and how the final records reconcile.

The joint Tempo-Knova solution is designed to make that path simpler.

Institutions can test tokenized payment use cases on Tempo while Knova coordinates the operational workflow around those payments. That includes integrating with existing systems, applying business and compliance controls, orchestrating approvals, monitoring transaction state, supporting privacy-aware workflows through Zones, and reconciling records across the traditional and tokenized sides of the flow.

The result is a faster path from experimentation to launch — without compromising institutional control or forcing institutions to choose between transparency and confidentiality.