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Ledger: Stripe's system for tracking and validating money movement
- dalton 3y agoFor those curious, YC funded an open source financial ledger company in S21: https://github.com/formancehq/stack https://github.com/formancehq/stack
- neoecos 3y agoIt is actually a very good product.
- westurner 3y agoDid they implement Interledger Protocol (ILP) for their traditional or digital asset ledger? https://interledger.org/developers/rfcs/interledger-protocol/ https://interledger.org/developers/rfcs/interledger-protocol...
- superzamp 3y agoMentioned company founder here, we did not yet! I'm glad to see the ILP project is continuing to progress well though, we should definitely consider it again.
- westurner 3y agoThe path finding capability perhaps externalized from ripplenet to W3C ILP being worth it, it's not clear why the market doesn't realize there is such incentive and ILP is not yet widely implemented.
- brunoqc 3y agoI guess it's "open core". "View license"
- ericyd 3y agoI'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.
- ian0 3y ago> have read several practical guides on ledgers and found them interesting reads Can you share some links?
- milesskorpen 3y agoModern Treasury has some great docs: https://www.moderntreasury.com/learn/what-is-a-ledger https://www.moderntreasury.com/learn/what-is-a-ledger
- ericyd 3y agoI'm fully aware of how unsatisfying this reply is, but unfortunately I can't seem to find links. It's been a few years since I was deep diving into ledgers and I must have cleared my bookmarks from that time.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoStripe strongly encourages writing for its own sake. So much so that they run their own press. I suspect the intended audience is whoever is curious for a medium depth primer in what a ledger looks like for a company handling billions of transactions. As someone in payment tech I found it very interesting.
- ilganeli 3y agoHello! I am the author. Thank you for the comment. While Stripe does love to write, I think our core premise here was that being able to reason mathematically about independent distributed systems was a unique application of a ledger. Likewise, we think the data quality offering is a unique extension since it gives us tools to make improvements to our systems over time.
- kaycebasques 3y agoHow is Stripe doing? There seems to be less HN front page news about Stripe these days.
- joshmanders 3y agoThings that just work quickly become boring and untalkworthy. Stripe is still king.
- hitekker 3y agoInternally, pretty messy, lots of burn out. Some of the big names they hired and the products they championed flamed out or became irrelevant. However, they still have decent numbers to show their investors.
- reese_john 3y ago> 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?
- ilganeli 3y agoWe model a timestamp which functionally is "when does this activity go on the books"? We compute clearing both based on this "effective_at" and a "system time" (there are some business functions with known periodicity and it makes for a useful debugging tool). Long-clearing activity makes for some interesting business cases and long-standing float obviously can lead to some detection noise. For example, Brazil has uniquely long settlement times.
- dwightboyyy 3y agoI work with payments in a bank in Brazil and as I was reading the question I thought "interesting question, here we have a great 'delay' in clearances and very old and very complex government-embedded systems to deal with it, funny to see that you know about it too. btw, are you familiar with Pix? https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/pix_en https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/pix_en
- lmz 3y agoWell at least some people there should be familiar with it - https://docs.stripe.com/payments/pix https://docs.stripe.com/payments/pix
- milesskorpen 3y agoThe general way you'd handle this is with undeposited or in-transit ledgers. Funds would go Account A > Undeposited Account B > Deposited Account B, where they're typically in Undeposited Account B for N days. All ledgers would balance.
- hanniabu 3y agoOr just use a blockchain for settlement
- jakewins 3y agoThis processes three orders of magnitude more transactions per day than ethereum. What would blockchain possibly be helpful with here?
- hknmtt 3y ago[dead]
- secondcoming 3y agoOnly 5bn events per day? That’s not a lot.
- Robin_Message 3y agoInteresting 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.