Howard Hughes Holdings pilots onchain financial verification with Tempo
Howard Hughes Holdings is piloting Tempo for reconciliation, audit, and cash management across its portfolio, with a path toward stablecoin settlement.
“Knowing how much cash you have or by how much it changed is not hard, you can tell from your general ledger and your bank statements. However, understanding how each dollar was spent and generated requires analysis that involves ledgers, subledgers, humans, and time. I've spent most of my career trying to solve this problem in real-time, with auditable evidence and confirmation from all third parties involved. We're working to solve this with Tempo as a single, trustworthy ledger across every entity and every payment rail, while protecting the security of our sensitive information.”
About Howard Hughes Holdings
Howard Hughes Holdings (NYSE: HHH) is a publicly traded holding company focused on growing long-term shareholder value. Through its real estate platform, Howard Hughes Communities, the company owns, manages, and develops commercial, residential, and mixed-use real estate throughout the U.S. The company manages billions of dollars in annual cash movement and builds shared operational infrastructure across its portfolio to drive efficiency at scale.
What Howard Hughes is building
Howard Hughes is developing two products on Tempo.
- TDV™ (Trustless Data Verification)
- Records every general ledger transaction from the ERP onchain in verified form, classified by cash and non-cash movement. This enables real-time reconciliation, automated financial statement classification, and evidence that traces each cash transaction to bank settlement in one place. The goal is to shift the timing from month-end to always, allowing the company to identify trends, issues, and opportunities much faster, and largely shifting internal controls from full-population review to estimates only.
- OneRail™
- Sits on top of the company's payment rails (ACH, wire, card, and eventually stablecoins) and represents all cash movement in a single canonical object called ORTO™ (OneRail Transaction Object). ORTO captures every cash-related event, who, what, when, how much, and why, in a standardized format, regardless of source system or payment rail.
The practical result: reconciliation that currently requires teams to manually match transactions across ERPs and bank statements happens automatically at the point of payment. Finance teams spend less time tracing discrepancies and more time on estimates and analysis. Year-end audits will start from a verified, immutable ledger instead of full GL populations. If a team starts with knowing that 80% of revenue is already reconciled to cash and validated by the bank and customers onchain, the risk is now only the remaining 20%. Because TDV classifies every line item by cash and non-cash movement, Howard Hughes will generate direct-method cash flow statements automatically, something most companies avoid because the manual effort is too high.
Howard Hughes has already validated the system against real transactions from its operating data with positive results.
Why Tempo
The company evaluated multiple approaches before building on Tempo:
- Privacy zones
- Howard Hughes is a public company. Construction budgets, lease terms, and development economics are sensitive financial data that cannot sit on a public ledger. Tempo's privacy zones let Howard Hughes control exactly who sees what. Auditors get full access. Authorized counterparties see only the transactions relevant to them. Everything else stays private. Compliance workflows like counterparty verification, audit trail generation, and transaction-level access governance are enforced at the zone level rather than through manual oversight.
- Memo fields
- Every transaction on Tempo can carry metadata like invoice references, PO numbers, and reconciliation tags. For Howard Hughes, this means every payment on the ledger links directly back to the source document in the ERP, enabling end-to-end traceability.
- Immutability
- Once a transaction is recorded on Tempo, it cannot be changed. This reduces the time and cost of year-end audits, since auditors can verify the ledger directly rather than rebuilding it from source systems.
- Cost and throughput
- Roughly $0.001 per transaction with sub-second finality. Low enough to run daily financial operations through the network at scale.
- Payments-first design
- Tempo is a Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for payments. Its architecture, including deterministic transaction ordering, predictable fees, and stablecoin-native execution, aligns with how OneRail™ works: Tempo serves as the execution and settlement layer while OneRail handles integration, orchestration, and reconciliation on top.
What's next
Expanding the pilot to additional entities, leveraging AI agents, and expanding the use of Tempo to include onchain settlement.
