Stripe Tempo isn't on Ethereum - 7 fake $TEMPO honeypots, 5 shipped in a single morning

If you searched for “$TEMPO” or “Tempo crypto” on Bing or Google this week and landed on an Ethereum contract address, you didn’t find Stripe’s payment chain. You found a honeypot.

Tempo is a standalone L1 blockchain launched by Stripe and Paradigm in 2026, purpose-built for stablecoin payments. It runs its own chain. There is no $TEMPO ERC-20. Every contract advertising itself as $TEMPO on Ethereum is a brand-jack.

Our analyzer has flagged 7 fake $TEMPO contracts on Ethereum mainnet. One precursor in April, six in May. Five of the May contracts were deployed inside a single 3h41 window on the morning of May 3 - what looks like a coordinated wave timed against the Stripe Tempo announcement.

The chronology

When (UTC)	Block	Address	Name	Score
2026-04-08 13:05	24,835,173	0x94de9a…	Tempo	80
2026-05-03 08:23	25,013,242	0x7fdec7…	Golden Tempo	80
2026-05-03 08:59	25,013,425	0xd55401…	Golden Tempo	83
2026-05-03 10:58	25,014,018	0x7bebd0…	Golden Tempo	80
2026-05-03 11:24	25,014,150	0xc61239…	Golden Tempo	80
2026-05-03 12:05	25,014,354	0x6852e3…	Golden Tempo	80
2026-05-09 21:47	25,060,305	0x798b30…	Golden Tempo	80

Five contracts in 222 minutes. All named “Golden Tempo” except the precursor. Different deployer wallet for each. Same outcome - every one of them simulates as a honeypot on the analyzer: buy_failed + sell_failed.

The full hub with FAQ and live risk scoring is at app.rektradar.io/scam/TEMPO.

The wave isn’t 5 deployers - it’s 2 operators

Seven different addresses deployed these contracts. That looks like seven independent scammers. It isn’t. Tracing the funding chain via our deployer graph collapses them into a much smaller number of operators.

Cluster A: 0xa9ac43f5b5e3

Funded 0x36c26f with 1.0 ETH → deployed 0x7bebd0… at 10:58
Funded 0xa3e244 with 1.0 ETH → deployed 0xc61239… at 11:24

Two deployer wallets, exactly 1.0 ETH each, 26 minutes apart, both from the same upstream wallet. Both contracts are “Golden Tempo”. This is one operator using a deployer-rotation trick to avoid being clustered by trivial address-equality scans.

Cluster B: 0x66a9893cc07d

Funded 0x963d6c → deployed 0x6852e3… on May 3 at 12:05
Funded 0x60e997 → deployed 0x798b30… six days later on May 9

Same deployer-rotation pattern, but this operator paused six days between the two contracts. Probably to see whether the first one accumulated enough buyers before deciding to ship another.

The remaining three contracts (0x7fdec7, 0xd55401, 0xc9b5b4) trace back to three separate funder addresses (0xa1abfa, 0x689313, 0xc3b694). Whether those are three more independent operators or the same operator using fresh funders is a question the analyzer can’t answer yet - what we can say is at least two distinct operators are running the same playbook.

Why “Golden Tempo”?

The naming is too consistent to be accidental. Six of the seven contracts deployed in May ship as “Golden Tempo”, not “Tempo”. The seventh, the April precursor, is named simply “Tempo”.

Two plausible explanations. First: the scammer wants to avoid an exact ticker-name collision with the legit project, on the bet that DEX search tools (Uniswap UI, 1inch, CowSwap) sort exact-match contracts first when a real ticker exists. By inserting “Golden”, they may have figured the contract surfaces in fuzzy-search and looks marginally more clickable. Second: the word “Golden” cues “premium” / “early access” - exactly the framing a retail buyer who saw the Stripe Tempo announcement and missed the chain launch would respond to.

Either way: the ticker is $TEMPO on every one of them. The contract name() field is “Golden Tempo”; the symbol() field is TEMPO. DEX aggregators index symbols, not names.

What the analyzer flagged

Across the seven contracts, the dominant risk flags are:

honeypot - 7/7 (the buy/sell simulator could not complete a round-trip)
buy_failed + sell_failed - 6/7 (transactions reverted in the buy and the sell)
unverified_contract - 4/7 (no source on Etherscan, deployer never published)
new_wallet - 4/7 (the deployer wallet was funded within hours of deploying)
scam_factory_name - at least 1 (the contract name matches a pattern our database has flagged on prior brand-jack waves)
multi_flag_confirmed_scam - at least 1 (cross-signal confirmation across honeypot + ownership + LP)

The score range is 80-83. None of these would clear a 40-point threshold. The retail user pasting any of these addresses into app.rektradar.io gets the same answer the analyzer gave: do not buy.

How to verify Stripe Tempo isn’t on Ethereum

Three quick checks anyone can run before buying anything labelled $TEMPO:

The project’s own announcement. Stripe and Paradigm announced Tempo as a standalone L1 blockchain for stablecoin payments. The communication is explicit: Tempo is its own chain, not a token on someone else’s. There is no plan documented anywhere for a Tempo ERC-20 on Ethereum, on Solana, or on any L2.
The contract age vs. the project age. Stripe Tempo was publicly announced in early 2026. The April 8 precursor on Ethereum was deployed before the May launch window. That’s an immediate red flag - any contract claiming to be the legit version of a project deployed before the project itself shipped is using insider knowledge of nothing, because there is no insider knowledge to use.
Etherscan verification + LP lock. None of the seven flagged contracts are verified on Etherscan; none have their LP locked through Unicrypt, TeamFinance, or PinkLock. A real project funded by Paradigm would not ship an unverified contract with an open LP. Period.

The retail funnel this is fishing

If you’re reading this, the user we’re worried about isn’t you. It’s the person who heard “Stripe is launching a crypto chain”, typed “TEMPO crypto” into Bing, clicked on 0xd55401… from a CoinGecko-style aggregator that hasn’t filtered fakes yet, and tried to buy 0.5 ETH worth.

That person’s transaction reverts on the buy. They don’t lose ETH yet - their gas got burned, but the buy failed. They retry. Maybe with higher slippage. Eventually a deployer with trading_control flag toggles permissions just long enough to let one buy through (depending on which contract - the analyzer differentiates the strict honeypots from the conditional-honeypots). That buy succeeds. The next sell does not. The exit liquidity is the buyer.

Five hours of buyer exit liquidity at 10 ETH initial pool depth across two operators (cluster A + cluster B = 4 of the 7 contracts) is roughly the 7.5 ETH rug template we documented yesterday. Different wrapper (honeypot vs. classic LP-yank rug), same arithmetic.

What to do

If you’re researching Stripe Tempo, don’t search “TEMPO crypto”. Go straight to the project’s own site at tempo.xyz. The chain runs on its own network - there is no Ethereum address to buy.

If you’ve already sent ETH to one of the seven flagged contracts and the buy reverted: you didn’t get rugged, only gas-burned. Don’t retry. The buy will keep failing.

If you’re a journalist or a researcher writing about Stripe Tempo and need a list of every $TEMPO impersonator on Ethereum: the live, sorted-by-risk hub is app.rektradar.io/scam/TEMPO - we re-analyze on every new deployment, the list grows in near-real time.

Paste any contract into the rug pull checker for the full flag breakdown.