Thank God it's May. With over $635 million in total value hacked, April was the most destructive month for DeFi since February last year, ranking sixth all-time.

And it wasn't just Drift and Aave.

There were 28 successful exploits in total. Put differently: DeFi got hacked once a day, every day, for an entire month.

While at least Aave appears to be on a steady path toward full recovery, most other protocols don't have the luxury of spinning up a "DeFi United" campaign to come to the rescue.

So how do you prevent this summer from turning into a DeFi Hack Summer? One suggestion came yesterday from Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi, who made the case for encouraging founders to wind down their "little DeFi" protocols if they have no real raison d'être anymore.

The take stirred controversy, but it hits a structural nerve. In normal startup land, 90% of companies fail and eventually go out of business. In DeFi, the failure rate is arguably higher, but for a range of technical and social reasons, dead protocols don't shut shop. They just sit there, undermaintained, and full of deposits.

You only need to scroll through DeFiLlama to see the scale. Over 400 protocols carry a total value locked above $10 million. So while April may be over, the North Korean honeypot isn’t drying up anytime soon.

Announcement spree: Over the past weeks, the Stripe-backed Layer-1 network Tempo has unveiled a series of key updates. First, the team introduced a new set of protocol features designed to support enterprise-grade payment workflows. Second, major financial players such as Visa and Zodia Custody have joined the network as its first external validators.

Rising competition: Given the scale of the stablecoin payments opportunity, some networks have ramped up efforts to build payments-focused infrastructure over the past 12 months to capture a share of the market. Among the established players, Polygon has been the most aggressive, spending $250 million earlier this year to acquire payments-related firms. It is also reportedly exploring an additional $100 million raise to further expand its stablecoin payments business.

New entrants, new strategies: At the same time, new players have entered the market, including stablecoin issuer Circle with its Arc network, as well as Stripe through its incubation of Tempo alongside crypto VC Paradigm. Unlike incumbents, these entrants are not layering payments onto existing general-purpose blockchains. Instead, they are designing their networks around enterprise-grade payments from day one, with a focus on reliability, fast finality, and very low fees.

Built for enterprises: To meet these requirements, Tempo is equipped with capabilities not typically found on general-purpose chains like Ethereum or Solana. These network-level features include a built-in decentralized exchange for stablecoins and tokenized deposits to improve liquidity, as well as a dedicated transaction type that allows users to pay fees in USD stablecoins or attach metadata to payments, effectively enabling onchain receipts.

Initial traction: Since Tempo’s mainnet launch in March, a growing number of companies across banking, fintech, and remittances have announced plans to build payments solutions on the network.

New building blocks: To unlock additional use cases and attract more enterprises, Tempo has recently introduced a new set of features:

Building for agents: Increasingly, however, Tempo is also going after the big opportunity that is agentic commerce. At Stripe Sessions, Stripe’s annual flagship conference on Wednesday, Tempo introduced streaming payments. The feature enables agents to execute thousands of micro-transactions per second, for example to pay for LLM tokens in real time as they are consumed. Under the hood, these transactions run on the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), which Tempo co-authored with Stripe.

What’s next: Looking ahead, Tempo is likely to become more tightly integrated into Stripe’s product suite. Stripe’s roadmap, which was published on Wednesday, already points to several upcoming Tempo integrations. The network is also set to play a key role in Stripe’s recent collaboration with Meta, powering the tech giant’s stablecoin creator payouts rolling out in Colombia and the Philippines.