Another payment giant will issue a stablecoin.

Mobile Payment Network News: Recently, global Digital Bank and “buy now, pay later” service provider Klarna is preparing to launch the dollar stablecoin KlarnaUSD for global transactions. This move means that Klarna becomes the first fintech company to issue a stablecoin on Tempo.

In September this year, Stripe collaborated with the cryptocurrency venture capital firm Paradigm to incubate a Layer 1 blockchain called “Tempo”, specifically designed for stablecoin payments. The birth of Tempo can be said to specifically address the issues often faced by existing general-purpose blockchains (such as Ethereum) when supporting large-scale payments, such as slow transaction speeds, high fee volatility, and congestion between different businesses. Tempo will provide a specially optimized infrastructure for the application of stablecoins in real financial scenarios such as global payments, salary distribution, and cross-border remittances. In addition to Stripe and Paradigm, the list of collaborators on the Tempo project also includes well-known companies from the technology, finance, and e-commerce sectors, such as Shopify, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, and OpenAI.

According to Mobile Payment Network, KlarnaUSD is built on Bridge's Open Issuance, with Bridge being a leading stablecoin infrastructure platform that became a subsidiary of Stripe after its acquisition. Currently, KlarnaUSD has gone live on the Tempo testnet and has not yet been publicly released. It is worth noting that the collaboration between Klarna and Stripe on stablecoins is also based on their existing relationship. For many years, Stripe has been responsible for handling most of Klarna's payment-related operations in 26 markets worldwide.

This marks the beginning of Klarna's proactive sharing of its cryptocurrency-related plans, with further developments to be disclosed in the coming weeks. The transaction fees generated by global cross-border payments are estimated to reach as high as $120 billion each year, and Klarna believes that stablecoins can significantly reduce costs for consumers and merchants.

Klarna co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski stated that cryptocurrency has now entered a phase of rapid, low-cost, secure, and scalable construction. With 114 million users and an annual gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $112 billion, Klarna has the scale advantage to transform the global payment landscape. Leveraging Klarna's scale and the blockchain infrastructure project led by Stripe, he believes KlarnaUSD can challenge traditional networks and provide faster and cheaper payment services for everyone.

Interestingly, Sebastian Siemiatkowski openly admitted that he did not know how blockchain and crypto mining work and held a denial attitude toward cryptocurrency as a whole. At the end of 2022, he described Bitcoin as a “decentralized Ponzi scheme.” It wasn't until February of this year that Sebastian Siemiatkowski underwent a 180-degree turn in his attitude towards crypto technology, publicly stating that Klarna would “embrace cryptocurrency.”

Sebastian Siemiatkowski stated on social media in February this year to “embrace cryptocurrency”.

Regardless, the issuance of stablecoins will make Klarna more prominent. Previously, in September 2025, Klarna successfully went public on the New York Stock Exchange. On November 18, 2025, local time, Klarna announced record performance for its first quarter post-listing, exceeding analysts' expectations. In the third quarter, Klarna's revenue was $903 million, a year-on-year increase of 26%; the quarterly GMV was $32.7 billion, with a 43% growth in the U.S. market; 27 million new users and 235,000 merchants were added, and the Klarna Card gained 4 million new users since July; Klarna expects revenue to exceed $1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Klarna can be said to be the latest financial technology institution to integrate stablecoins and blockchain technology into its operations. Since the beginning of this year, banks and fintech companies have increasingly turned to stablecoins to reduce transaction costs and settlement times. According to incomplete statistics from Mobile Payment Network, more than 10 global banks and financial institutions, including Citigroup, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York Mellon, UBS, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Société Générale, have already made substantial layouts in the field of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies.

For example, JPM Coin from JPMorgan and its upgraded Kinexys platform aim to achieve real-time cross-border payments and foreign exchange settlements through blockchain technology, thereby reducing transaction costs and risks; just last month, remittance service provider Western Union announced a collaboration with Anchorage Digital, with plans to launch a stablecoin (USDPT) on Solana in the first half of 2026.

In summary, in the face of the impact that stablecoins may have on traditional deposit and payment systems, many global banks and financial institutions have chosen to explore collaboration or form consortiums to jointly respond. The issuance of stablecoins, with the primary goal of integrating the high efficiency and innovation of blockchain technology into their own payment and settlement systems, is aimed at addressing the impending crypto competition.