I'm not sure who is the audience of this article. I've worked in fintech and have read several practical guides on ledgers and found them interesting reads. In contrast, this one is laden with overly verbose language whose meaning is unclear, such as
> Transaction-level fund flows give us powerful tools to reason about complex interconnected subcomponents.
This article reads as a fluff piece for investors to me; it's primary purpose seems to be boasting about their own quality while offering only the smallest of breadcrumbs about the underlying system.
I'd be curious if others have a different read, and found this to be more insightful/interesting, and why.
> Even when we have billions of transactions, a single missing, late, or incorrect transaction immediately creates a detectable accuracy issue with a simple query—for example, “Find the clearing Accounts with nonzero balance.”
How do you deal with float, transactions where the first leg happens in T+0 but settlement is done in T+N ? Do the clearing accounts have a flag/mark allowing for a nonzero balance?
Interesting ratios between transactions and events: numbers in the article suggest perhaps 50 million transactions a day which correspond to five billion events. So 100 events per transaction on average, which gives some idea of the complexity involved.
How is Stripe doing? There seems to be less HN front page news about Stripe these days.
Only 5bn events per day? That’s not a lot.
Or just use a blockchain for settlement
For those curious, YC funded an open source financial ledger company in S21: https://github.com/formancehq/stack