Key Takeaways
- In August, Circle, Stripe, and Google all advanced plans to develop their own Layer 1 blockchains.
- These new platforms are built from the ground up to scale mainstream payments.
- Emerging payment chains encroach on an area that has traditionally been Ripple’s territory.
For years, Ripple has positioned its product suite as uniquely optimized to power mainstream global payments, differentiating it from the abstract, token-driven systems envisaged by Bitcoin and other blockchains.
But with Circle, Stripe, and Google all planning to launch their own payment-focused Layer 1 chains, Ripple’s offering faces new competition.
Blockchain Payments
From the very beginning, payments have driven the development of blockchain technology, even as other use cases have multiplied.
The biggest development in recent years has been the rise of stablecoins. However, several designs for tokenized deposits and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) also leverage blockchain technology.
However, the public blockchains that currently dominate aren’t optimized for small-value, retail transactions, and can’t compete on price with legacy, interbank rails. Nor does the infrastructure for stablecoin payment acceptance come close to global card networks.
Against this backdrop, Circle, Stripe, and Google are seeking to reimagine blockchain payments by building new, custom blockchains from the ground up.
Circle, Stripe, and Google Building New Blockchains
Since Circle launched USDC in 2018, it has expanded across two dozen Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains, but none of these were designed to host the stablecoin.
High throughput chains like Solana and Polygon have brought USDC fees down to less than $0.01 per transaction. But fees need to be paid in each network’s native token, introducing an extra layer of complexity for users.
Because it utilizes USDC as its gas currency, Circle’s Arc seeks to overcome this problem, lowering fees and simplifying both the developer and user experience of stablecoins.
In a similar vein, Stripe’s proposed blockchain, codenamed Tempo, is reportedly designed to speed up stablecoin transactions, lower costs, and attract enterprise customers, especially large-scale businesses.
Of the firms seeking to shake up blockchain payments, Google is the most ambitious.
Rather than simply building a new stablecoin chain like Circle and Stripe, Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL) is envisaged as a much more open-ended blockchain payments solution.
While the firm hasn’t revealed much about how the platform will work, GCUL is expected to support a range of payment instruments, including stablecoins.
A Threat to Ripple
Both the rise of stablecoins and Google’s under-development blockchain platform pose a threat to Ripple, which provides cross-border payment solutions that bypass the correspondent banking system.
These days, however, stablecoins offer many of the same advantages for international transfers, and there are a growing number of payment solutions that leverage stablecoins as a cross-border settlement layer.
Facing intense competition, Ripple launched RLUSD in 2024, positioning it as a more institution-friendly alternative to USDT and USDC. But with Circle and Tether increasingly vying for the institutional stablecoin market with custom products and services, it may be too late for Ripple to catch up.
Meanwhile, Google is focusing on the high-value backbone of capital markets, building a product that could have broad appeal across banking and finance.
GCUL offers a single API for multi-asset settlement, granting institutions a one-stop alternative to Ripple’s network for both foreign exchange legs and principal settlement. This diminishes the case for using XRP as bridging liquidity, which remains a key service for Ripple.
If the platform functions as an orchestration solution for different forms of digital money, including stablecoins, tokenized deposits and potentially even CBDCs, banks could extend it to cross-border treasury, trade finance, and payment service provider settlements—areas Ripple courts today.
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James Morales is CCN’s blockchain and crypto policy reporter. He has been working in the news media since 2020, writing about topics such as payments, banking and financial technology. These days, he likes to explore the latest blockchain innovations and the evolving landscape of global crypto regulation.
With an educational background in social anthropology and media studies, James uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.
