KAST is bringing its stablecoin earn product onto Tempo and joining as design partner
KAST is a global financial platform built on stablecoin rails. Users can hold, move, and spend stablecoin balances through a card accepted at 150 million merchants in 170+ countries.
About KAST
KAST is a global financial platform built on stablecoin rails. Users can hold, move, and spend stablecoin balances through a card accepted at 150 million merchants in 170+ countries. Since launch, KAST has grown to more than one million users and processes close to $5B in annualized transaction volume.1
KAST's growth has been driven by markets where traditional banking and cross-border payments leave the most friction on the table: global citizens, workers paid across borders, families sending money home, and small businesses operating in multiple currencies. Stablecoins do work that legacy rails cannot.
The challenge
For stablecoins to power mainstream financial products, the infrastructure underneath has to be built for real-world throughput, reliability, and operations. General-purpose blockchains were not built with those requirements in mind.
As KAST scales, the settlement layer becomes a strategic decision. Three things mattered most:
Performance at consumer scale. Card authorizations, merchant settlements, and user-facing transfers cannot compete with NFT mints or DeFi liquidations for blockspace.
Predictable economics. Fee volatility breaks unit economics for high-volume, low-margin consumer flows.
Operational maturity. Reconciliation, compliance, and treasury workflows are non-negotiable for a regulated consumer financial product.
The approach
KAST is working with Tempo on two specific commitments:
A stablecoin earn product on Tempo. KAST plans to launch its earn product that will let users put idle stablecoin balances to work without leaving the KAST app, powered by a vault on Tempo. The design is global by default and extensible across product types and asset classes over time.
Design partner on what comes next. KAST is working with Tempo as a design partner to shape new features and products. KAST's scale across 170+ countries and its user base spanning LATAM, North America, MENA, and Asia provide a real-world testing ground for what consumer stablecoin products need at scale.
Why Tempo
Tempo is incubated by Stripe and Paradigm and built specifically for payments at scale. The capabilities that mattered most to KAST:
- Sub-second finality with deterministic settlement
- Average fees of $0.001 for stablecoin payments, no gas auctions or fee spikes
- Dedicated payment lanes with guaranteed blockspace at the protocol level
- Dollar-denominated fees paid in stablecoins, no volatile native token exposure
- Native account abstraction for batch payouts, fee sponsorship, and passkey authentication
- Payments metadata for clean reconciliation against existing systems
“KAST is focused on building real financial products that scale globally. Tempo gives us a foundation to build on what stablecoin rails can unlock across payments and the next generation of money movement.”
What's next
KAST and Tempo are rolling out across these workstreams over the coming months.
If you are building consumer financial products on stablecoins, talk to us →.
