ARQ, a financial services platform serving over 2 million customers across Latin America, is issuing its own stablecoin on Tempo to take direct control of the payment rail powering its cross-border products. Learn more in the full customer story →
Stablecoins already power the infrastructure behind ARQ’s cross-border payment engine. More than 2 million customers across Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil use the platform to hold and move dollars and euros, invest in international markets, and spend worldwide. ARQ processes more than $10 billion in annualized transaction volume, all settled on stablecoin infrastructure that users never see.
But as ARQ expands into investing, credit, and everyday spending, relying on third-party stablecoins introduces constraints: limited control over transaction economics, dependency on external treasury operations, and friction that compounds at scale. The next step is owning the rail itself.
ARQ and Tempo
ARQ is issuing its own stablecoin on Tempo, giving it direct control over issuance, redemption, and the settlement infrastructure underneath its products. Settlement costs become a function of Tempo’s fixed $0.001 fees rather than third-party issuer terms. Treasury operations simplify. And the stablecoin becomes a native building block that ARQ can integrate directly into new products without negotiating integration terms with an external issuer for each one.
“From day one, Tempo understood what we were building, moved with urgency, and offered the infrastructure, product vision, and long-term alignment we needed to scale ARQ,” said Zach Garman, Co-founder and CPO of ARQ.
Why Tempo
Tempo is purpose-built for institutional payments. For a use case like stablecoin issuance at scale, several capabilities made the difference.
Gas abstraction lets ARQ pay transaction fees in any USD-denominated stablecoin rather than a volatile native token, keeping the entire operation denominated in dollars. Sub-second deterministic finality provides the settlement certainty that users and regulators expect. Protocol-level compliance controls, including allowlists, blocklists, and freeze-and-pause capabilities, are built directly into the chain. Native memo fields compatible with ISO 20022 make reconciliation against existing systems straightforward.
Tempo’s product roadmap also aligns with where ARQ is headed: on-chain FX, privacy features, and native stablecoin settlement capabilities that will matter as the platform scales across more markets and product lines.
What this means
For a fintech already processing $10 billion a year on stablecoin infrastructure, issuing on Tempo is not an experiment. It is the next logical step in controlling the economics and architecture of its own payment stack.
Over time, the same infrastructure opens a path to native on-chain FX, direct merchant settlement, and programmable payment flows as ARQ’s product suite grows. For the 2 million customers who already use ARQ across the Americas, the result is a platform where the infrastructure underneath is as modern as the product on top.
If you’re a fintech or financial services company exploring stablecoin issuance or settlement on Tempo, get in touch at partners@tempo.xyz.
