Brazil solved instant payments. In 2020, the Banco Central do Brasil shipped Pix: send money to anyone, 24/7, in seconds, using their email or phone number instead of a 20-digit account number. Adoption was fast enough to make cards look slow, and it's now one of the most-used payment rails in the country.
Almost nowhere else has that. Most markets have the pieces - bank rails,
card networks, one or more mobile-money providers - but not that in shape.
Every provider is its own island; sending money across providers, or across borders, usually means routing through an intermediary that takes a cut and adds a day. That's true of a lot of Europe, most of Latin America outside Brazil, and it's especially visible in African mobile money: a large and fast-growing base of accounts across M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, Orange Money, Wave and dozens of others, with almost none of them able to talk to each other directly.
So I started building raio: an open-source instant-payment foundation in Rust, learning the shape of Pix - alias-based pay-to-key, 24/7 settlement, a "scan to pay" QR - and building it for interoperability instead of a single central bank or a single market. Not a bank. Not a wallet. A foundation: the root-of-trust types and the trait seams, for anyone building a rail on top, anywhere.
